Cybermage, page 26
“In the First World,” Thea said. “Beside the portal I had made.”
Tawaha was nodding. “And do you recall what the last thing that you did in that world was, just before you stepped away through that portal, back to this world, Cheveyo’s world?”
Thea found herself starting to smile, too, through tears, as the memory returned. “I grabbed… a ribbon of fire to weave,” she said. “Your fire.”
Tawaha nodded. “You did not know it yet, not then, but it is because you have it in you to hold the Fire Element, because you are a Fire Elemental yourself, that you were able to hold that flame at all without being scorched by it. You have carried it within yourself ever since you first touched it, and it is not your fire, it is mine. I loaned it, and now I can take it back. This I can take, without harming your own gift, that part of your power that is yours alone. The sun fire can serve as the spark to bring the other fire back to life.”
“She does not carry it,” Cheveyo said. He had not moved from his position by his hearth since this gathering had begun, but now he strode forward, leaning on his staff. “The morning she returned from the First World to my own hearth… was the first and only time I have eaten breakfast cooked over a holy fire. She thrust your flame into my embers, Great One. It has long since burned away into ashes.”
“Not all,” Tawaha said tranquilly. “Enough remains. Hold out your hand to me, child.”
Thea obeyed, offering her hand, flat and palm up, to Tawaha. The Sun God raised his own burnished hand and held it a span away from her own, close enough that she felt the heat blister her fingertips.
A spark crackled between her index finger and his, and then from every finger each to the other, until a fiery arc of white and gold light spanned their two hands, leaving a bright cradle of light into which Grandmother Spider gently laid the body of the pigeon whom she had lifted from its silken shroud.
Electricity snapped and sparked in the air around Thea and Tawaha, and the bird suspended in air and fire between them. It hung there for an instant, still motionless, lying as it had been placed there.
And then it exploded in a flash of red-gold wings, like a phoenix rising from its own ashes, wingtips showering sparks as they beat powerfully to allow the bird to hover in place.
Tawaha broke the contact, clenching his own hand into a fist and away. Thea staggered and nearly fell, catching the hand that had held the fire with the other, biting her lip as she glanced down at what she thought had to be blisters on her fingertips. She found none, even though she had literally held her hand in the sun’s own corona. But she didn’t have time to think about that, not just then. She looked up again, in time to notice the Fire Pigeon fly like an arrow towards Tesla and land with grace and precision on the wrist of his outstretched arm. Tesla was openly weeping, his face streaked with tears.
“Terry,” Thea said in a low voice, speaking over her shoulder without taking her eyes off Tesla and his pigeon, “finish it.”
There was the sound of rapid typing, and the pigeon on Tesla’s arm brightened into a shape of light almost impossible to look at without hurting one’s eyes, and then it too was just a form of air and shadow like its fellows in the cage and glowing with an orange-yellow radiance. A final tap of a computer key, and the birdcage was open, the other four Elements free and clustering around Tesla in a cloud of multi-coloured light, bathing his face in a luminous brightness.
“We do not understand,” the Alphiri Queen spoke into the rapt silence that followed.
Thea turned to look at her, and found the Queen staring straight back at her, with an expression that spoke of confusion, of resignation, of a deep and irreparable loss. Thea suddenly realised that not even the Queen’s two echoes had spoken in her wake, as was the Alphiri custom. They appeared to have withdrawn, and were standing beside the portal through which they had arrived, one on either side, like an honour guard.
“This is not the kind of bargain that we can make,” the Queen said. “We sought… a legacy, an immortality, something that might remain in memory of us when we pass away–as it is written that all must, in their time. We have done all that may be done within the rule of our law, we have bought all that could have been bought, have offered payment for things that may not have been for sale. But that is what we know how to do. We will give fair price for what we consider to be fair service or fair trade. But we do not understand what you have just done. What was the bargain that you made? What did you choose? What was offered to you in return?”
“The things that cannot be measured or owned,” Thea said. “A sense of losing a small part of self to become part of a bigger whole. None of us is alone, in the end; we are one, and it is not a loss to give when someone else receives.”
The Queen narrowed her eyes and looked as though she was about to speak again, but Terry’s computer was not yet done. Thea heard more keys tapping, and then something brightened painfully to a fiery glow that rivalled Tawaha’s for a moment before settling into a faint luminous aura that now surrounded the figure of a transformed Tesla. There was a light in his eyes that had not been there before, and he was actually smiling.
Kristin and Tess both stood with their hands covering their faces and eyes gleaming with an astonished joy from behind their fingers. Cat was crying openly. Ben was standing quite still, only his eyes flickering from one to the other of the improbable assembly gathered in this place, as though he was trying to commit all of this to memory.
As for Humphrey May, he was gazing on Tesla with an air of resignation. Whatever his plans had originally been, what had happened here had derailed everything. He was now looking at an Elemental mage–now once again the only quad-Elemental in human history–and coming to terms with the fact that whatever his ideas had been on this score, they were now confetti in the wind.
Terry had got up from a crouch where he had been balancing his laptop on his knees, and laid it aside on the ground at his feet. He took a few uncertain steps towards Thea.
“Are you all right?’ he whispered.
In reply she lifted a hand and held it out for him to see; her fingers trembled. “I think that I might fall down in a heap if I try to move an inch from where I’m standing.”
He reached out and took her hand, squeezing it.
“What did you mean when you said that Tesla had named you a new thing?” he asked quietly.
Thea actually managed to laugh softly. “He named a new Element,” she said. “One you’re very familiar with. He called me cybermage.”
They were given no further chance to talk, as the Alphiri Queen suddenly lifted her long skirts and stepped delicately over to where Tesla was standing, pausing briefly to rake Corey up and down with a cool glance. The Trickster squirmed underneath the scrutiny.
“Er,” he said, “Well, under the circumstances… I guess you won’t be needing me any longer, for the time being, anyway. Give me a call if there’s anything I can do for you in the future– ”
He flashed a look of exasperated frustration Thea’s way, but was distracted by another feather popping into place just above his ear. He reached to pluck it with a growl.
“And I’m sure we will cross paths again,” he said to Thea, even as the Alphiri Queen turned her back on him as though he was of no further consequence at all. His face darkening into a scowl, Corey threw a quick apprising look at Tawaha and Grandmother Spider, and obviously came to the conclusion that retreat was the better part of valour here. He blurred his shape and dropped onto all fours, turning his sharp coyote snout in what looked like a final defiant grin at Thea and at the other Elder Spirits, and trotted off across the broken scree that spilled at the foot of the mesa.
In the meantime, the Alphiri Queen took the few more steps that brought her to stand before Nikola Tesla.
Tesla offered her a small formal bow, barely fulfilling the protocol that her rank should have demanded, and then waited with his back straight and his head high for the result of her inspection, meeting her gaze unflinchingly.
“We needed you,” she said simply.
There was nothing more to be said on that score. Her two companions said nothing to qualify that statement any further.
“Madam,” Tesla said with old-world courtesy, “without the powers that I now hold, and one of which you tried to withhold from me, I would have been of little use to you in the endeavour to which you wished to put me. In full possession of those powers, you could never have held me against my will, because I can mould the world to my wishes and the prison does not exist that could keep me where I did not wish to stay.”
“That may be true,” she said. “We might have proved different. But we have lost here. No matter, though.”
Her head swivelled very slowly until her gaze, suddenly thoughtful and calculating, came to rest on a particular set of the spectators. Ben, Cat, Kristin and Tess instinctively drew closer to one another, as though there was safety in that proximity. The Queen turned away from Tesla without another word. Her two companions had left the portal, and had once again fallen into step beside her.
“We have found out,” the Queen said, “many important things this day.”
“We have lost a chance.”
“But we have gained knowledge.”
“We have learned that everyone has a price,” the Queen said softly, looking at Cat.
“We just have to know what you treasure, and what you want,” the minion said.
The Queen let her hand brush over Kristin’s face as the third Alphiri spoke.
“And we can find out.”
The Queen paused, staring at each face in turn for another instant as though she was committing them all to memory, and then turned with a slow and deliberate menace to where Thea stood a little way apart from the others. Terry, standing beside her and still holding her hand, tightened his fingers; perhaps it was that which helped her not to flinch under the weight of the Alphiri Queen’s gaze.
“We know who has what we want,” the Queen said.
“We know where it is.”
“We know how to get it.”
“We go now. We may have to start again, but we have done that many times before.”
“We have time,” said the first minion. “We have patience. We have resources we have yet to tap.”
“We will return.”
They walked towards Thea, the Queen coming to a brief halt right in front of her and gazing at Thea’s face with an even more intent stare than she had given to the others. Then she glanced, with a small enigmatic smile, at Terry, and at the still clasped hands that linked the two.
A sudden black terror bloomed in Thea’s mind.
We know what you treasure, and what you want…
The Queen had looked at every one of Thea’s friends individually, as though each of them was prey, gazelles to a prowling lioness, to be stalked and slaughtered at a mere whim. But the look she had given Terry had been more than that, it had been a look that Thea herself had been meant to see, and understand.
She, Thea, was the new quarry. And the Alphiri, although they would obey the letter of the law and their Trade Codex, had shown all too readily how willing they were to ignore the spirit of that law. If they had to, they would bend the law into a pretzel to make sure they were covered if challenged. But they would eventually find a way around every fence and barrier and protective wall that could be raised against them.
They had shown their hand too early this time, and had acted with more rash carelessness than prudent planning. From here on, they would lay their snares with more cunning and subtlety.
And it was entirely possible that nobody Thea cared about would ever be safe again.
SIXTEEN
You haven’t felt Alphiri fury. Not yet. Not completely.
Long after the Alphiri Queen and her minions had stepped back through their portal and vanished from the plateau outside Cheveyo’s house, it was these words, the words of the Faele Queen, the ruler of another polity and one who knew the Alphiri well, that pulsed in Thea’s mind like a warning.
She had snatched her hand from Terry’s even as the Alphiri Queen had walked away, felt him flinch at the suddenness and force of it, but could not look at him, could not look at any of them. Turning her back on them all as though the mere act of taking her own eyes off them would render them invisible to the Alphiri, would keep them safe. She stumbled half-blindly around the ridge of red rock that rose at the back of Cheveyo’s abode, hearing a stir behind her, voices, someone calling out her name, someone else responding quietly and firmly, but no footsteps followed her.
She felt, rather than saw, Tawaha taking his leave of the company. The day suddenly dipped into sunset around her. The sky above her turning jewelled shades of amber and ruby and amethyst, and darkening into deeper shades of twilight to the east.
Where you are and where light is, I will always be with you, Tawaha had said that to her, had promised her that. But now there seemed to be more at stake than just herself. Her mind was racing, presenting her with images of all the people she now needed Tawaha to watch over, her family, the friends who had already been through so much with her. People like Lorenzo and Beltran de los Reyes to whom she would always feel a distant sense of kinship and debt because of their brother Diego and what he had meant to her. Even random strangers off the street whose well-being she could not remotely be considered responsible for but whom she would find it difficult to simply abandon to a fate she knew to be uncomfortable or unpleasant at the hands of the Alphiri if the possibility of preventing that was dangled in front of her.
Even people who could be expected to be able to take care of themselves. Humphrey May. Nikola Tesla.
She subsided onto a nearby boulder and buried her face in her hands, her breath coming out in an involuntary sob. She had been building up her world, slowly, from the inner circle of her family to the sphere of the friends she had made at the Academy to the wider arena of people who were mentors or teachers or otherwise interested and proud of what she was and she could yet become. But now it was crumbling around her again, snatching her back into that shell of the lonely child which she had thought she had shed and left behind. What she had thought of as her strength was turning out to be her greatest vulnerability.
She suddenly found herself with a far better understanding of the loneliness and isolation that she had often sensed surrounding Nikola Tesla, who must have been faced with similar choices.
A skitter of pebbles and the soft sound of a footfall on red dust alerted Thea to the fact that she was no longer alone, but she waited for a moment before she wiped the tears from her cheeks with her fingers and dropped her hands from her face, looking up.
Humphrey May stood above her, his hands in the pockets of his jeans.
“Your friend Cheveyo suggested we eat something,” Humphrey said. “Are you hungry?”
Thea shook her head mutely.
Humphrey squatted down beside her, reaching out to lay a hand on her shoulder. “Thea, are you all right? What did the Queen say to you? Did she threaten you? We can protect you. There are avenues…”
“They won’t come for me,” Thea said. “Not directly.”
He looked a little startled, and then nodded slowly. “I understand,” he murmured. “But we can deal with that. They can be constrained. The inter-polity court has a long reach, and not even the Alphiri are beyond that.”
“You just granted immunity to the Faele, for doing something on our behalf,” Thea said. “There are… too many things they could do. I don’t know what, or how. I used to think that I was scared of them, but I never knew what that really meant, not until now.”
“I offered you a job at the FBM, once,” Humphrey said. His tone was light, but when Thea looked up at him his face was completely serious. “That still stands, you know. I can guarantee a berth for you if you just say the word. And if you’re part of the establishment, as it were, the Alphiri would think twice about harming you or the people close to you.”
“Still trying to recruit a tame Elemental for the FBM?” another voice said, and Tesla stepped forward from behind the ridge of the mesa. They had not heard him coming, not surprisingly, since he could choose not to have enough of a physical presence for an audible footfall.
Humphrey uncoiled from his crouch beside Thea, and turned to face the new arrival. “That’s hardly fair,” he said.
Tesla raised an eyebrow. “Fair? I suppose I do not often consider that angle when I am stating facts. The truth of it was, when I was available and physically living in this world you, or your predecessors at the FBM, tried very hard to put a leash onto me. And it would have been pleasant, in a way, I will have to admit. The safety and security of it, the knowledge that I was behind a rampart and untouchable, the idea that I could have unlimited funds for what I needed for my work… so long as that work was done on your behalf, at your command. The ordinary, everyday magic of our kind, the kind practiced every day in our world, the one you are most closely charged with at the FBM, has been broken to saddle, and cultivated, and tamed.”
“My father used to wrangle wild magic,” Thea said. “When it escaped from its confines, and took over libraries.”
“We had a lot more of that in my day,” Tesla said. “We knew less about how precisely things worked, back then. But even so, we understood that there were rules, and that magic had to obey them.” He paused, and turned his full attention back to Humphrey again. “All magic, except the Elemental. You have never been able to grasp that Elemental magic cannot be broken to your will. Not that, and stay what it is. Your trouble is, I think, that you understand magic but no longer completely believe in it. Enchantment shorn of a sense of wonder becomes… empty words. And numbers. And book-keeping.”
“You were no stranger to book-keeping when you lived amongst us, as you yourself point out,” Humphrey snapped, losing his temper. “As all of us do, you too required money in order to exist. Well, you might have commanded more power than any of us knew, but by all accounts you were appallingly bad at that book-keeping you so despise. You were always letting money slip through your fingers, living off credit and beyond your means…”
