Gift of the Unmage (19 page)

“Your mother has
seen
it?” Thea said. “Is she in any danger, then?”

Tess turned suddenly panicked eyes on her. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “I wish I
had
been paying attention, now. All that I’m sure of is that it’s just
there
, waiting….”

“Where’s ‘there’?” Magpie asked. “Don’t look at me like that; I spent most of the summer at the rez and they don’t really pay attention to outside news, at least not in my family. Then I came here, and you know what
this
place is like with anything to do with magic. I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

“We’ll all know soon enough,” Thea said grimly. “If people are dead because of this thing, that’s news. So far, it seems, it’s been just an inexplicable shadow, lurking in the background, and only a handful of people could see it, sense it, whatever. Now, if it’s turned physical…”

But no details were forthcoming, and finally Mrs. Chen came over to the residence hall to
make them all turn their lights off and go to bed. Tess asked her outright what the matter was, but Mrs. Chen merely looked grave.

“You will know if it is necessary for you to know,” she said.

“But people
died
,” Tess persisted. “Are…people in danger?”

“Are
we
in danger?” another girl asked.

“Here, in this place, you may be in less danger than anyone else you know,” Mrs. Chen said. And then she closed her hand tightly about the medallion she wore around her neck, pressed her narrow lips together until her mouth was little more than a thin line, and said no more.

“It’s something to do with magic, then,” Magpie whispered to Thea after lights out, as they both lay wide awake in their beds. “And the people who died must be mages. What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know,” Thea whispered. But she had placed her feather necklace under her pillow and her fingers stroked the eagle feather that Cheveyo had given her. Raven, for wisdom. Eagle, for courage.

A turkey feather for patience.

Thea had an awful sense of something huge that
stood in her path, not yet visible, brooding just beyond the next bend. And it was Cheveyo’s voice that kept coming back to haunt her in the darkness of her room, there in the Last Ditch School.

When there is a battle to be fought, it is you who can choose the place of the battlefield
.

1.

T
HE TRANSFORMATION
of the Academy from a sanctuary into a place where isolation had bred a predictable surge of sudden interest bordering on fascination was almost frighteningly fast.

The school subscribed to several newspapers and magazines, and there was little that could be done to prevent access by those eager to know more about the doings of the Nothing. But the media was very circumspect about the story—surprisingly circumspect, in fact. Although newspapers carried the names of several people who had had fatal encounters with the Nothing, very little was said about the nature of their demise, although magical circumstances were strongly implied.

Teachers took pains to return the school to its
normal everyday pursuits in the days and weeks that followed that night of excitement when news of the Nothing stirred the school’s quiet halls into a frenzy. But that was almost impossible to do. Scared students phoned home to check on their families and found out more information, a lot of it conflicting and unsubstantiated, which promptly flew into a flock of rumors buzzing like angry hornets around a ruined nest. Teachers wouldn’t answer direct questions, but every now and again they’d let something slip and that, too, was grist for the rumor mill.

In Thea’s own little circle of friends, it was the twins who reacted the worst. Terry physically could not talk to his family about the phenomenon in any meaningful way. Even the suspicion that the Nothing was a magical entity or was being fought in magical ways would be enough to steer the conversation into waters dangerous to his health. He could not even talk to his own sister about the matter. He was constantly scribbling little notes to Tess, so
she
could phone their parents and make sure everything was all right. The weight of those expectations, in turn, made Tess herself terribly anxious, especially as nobody at home was either able or willing to
give her the full scoop—and she knew for a fact that her own mother had seen and felt the Nothing.

And the newspaper reports, although they never said so unequivocally, hinted strongly and darkly that anyone who had direct experience with the Nothing was in grave danger, in ways far too gory, apparently, to be revealed to the general public.

Thea’s contribution had been to phone her Aunt Zoë. Her father had government connections every bit as good as Terry and Tess’s parents, and her mother was no slouch when it came to Ars Magica, but for some reason Thea shied from talking to them about magic while she was at school. Besides, she had always trusted her aunt’s forthright honesty.

But Zoë was of less help than Thea might have wished.

“Darling child, I would tell you more if I could, I swear,” Zoë had said. “But not even your father will talk about it in any kind of detail. I do know of those deaths, and I do know that the…the
thing
…has been unsuccessfully attacked by magical means, and that this is where the deaths come in. So you’re perfectly
right, it has something to do with magic. But just what…”

“Do the Alphiri have anything to do with it?” Thea had asked. Somehow, she had begun to associate all dark dangerous things with the wielders of the Trade Codex. She could not figure out how the Alphiri would benefit from something like this directly, but she was sure that, if there was a way, they could be trusted to find it.

“The Alphiri?” Zoë asked, astonished. “There have been rumors…but…why would you think that?”

“I don’t know. I just keep having visions of them coming in at the last moment with a vial of antidote and asking a high price for it,” Thea said.

She could almost see Zoë’s eyebrow arch on the other end of the line. “Well,
that
smells nicely conspiratorial,” she said.

“What
does
a conspiracy smell like?” Thea asked, diverted.

“Like milk just beginning to turn,” Zoë said. “Thea, what on
earth
have they been telling you up there? You sound like you’ve been gazing into a dozen crystal balls at once and getting decidedly mixed messages.”

“You might say I have,” Thea said. “Nobody says
anything
, really, which is far worse than just telling us what they know—because I’m sure that what we imagine is bigger and blacker than even the Nothing can possibly be.”

“Don’t be so certain,” Zoë murmured.

“Have
you
actually seen it?” Thea asked, suddenly aware of a small cold touch of fear.

“Smelled it,” Zoë said. “Felt it. Like a stench of carrion. Like the weight of night. Like that smoky last gasp of a just-extinguished candle. No, I haven’t seen it. But it’s been present. There can be few with any kind of magical talent who aren’t aware of its presence.”

The conversation left Thea feeling frustrated and unsettled. She shared whatever information she could winnow out of it with her friends, and saw Tess blanch at the images that Zoë had invoked. Tess had started chewing on her fingernails until she drew blood. But there appeared to be little any of them could do, except wait.

And then their teachers started to disappear.

The first one to go was Magpie’s Latin teacher. His name was Guy Hadden, but his class knew him as Master Gaius—a man with a hooked nose and raptorlike glittering eyes who
wouldn’t have looked too out of place in the Roman Senate. His facility with languages in general—he spoke twenty-seven of them fluently—and classical Latin in particular was a legend in the school, where he had been teaching for nearly a quarter of a century. He vanished without warning one day, and was replaced by a young substitute who couldn’t say when Master Gaius would be back but that he had left instructions for his class to memorize (and pay attention to the correct accent while doing so) an entire batch of poems by obscure early Roman poets, and that there would be a test on it before the end of the year.

“I’ve never heard of any of these guys,” one of Magpie’s classmates had muttered. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he made the whole heap up himself.”

It had been an attempt to introduce laughter, as if that could be raised as a weapon against the Nothing. But whatever relief it had brought didn’t last.

One of the English lit teachers was the next to disappear. Mrs. Entwhiler’s claim to fame was that she could quote almost the entire body of William Shakespeare’s work by heart, and
expected her charges to aspire to the same level of accomplishment. There were those in her class with less than perfect memories, who actually breathed a sigh of relief at their reprieve before they admitted to being worried about their teacher’s whereabouts.

She was closely followed by Keiko Yamaguchi, who taught Japanese.

And then, unexpectedly and somehow far more frighteningly, by Twitterpat.

“I have to take a short leave of absence,” he told his class, his expressive hands weaving a dance in the air before him. “I know that you have had a number of your teachers leave you in the past couple of weeks, and that there have been some fierce rumors flying around. Some of you may already have realized that most of the teachers in question have been language experts—linguists—and the possible link this might have to Ars Magica and its own connection to the power of the word. Well, you may or may not take comfort in the fact that I am not a language teacher.”

“Yes, sir, you are,” Tess said unexpectedly. “Computers have a language, too.”

Twitterpat ducked his head, his hands flutter
ing around his ears like crazed butterflies. “That may indeed be so, if you choose to look at it that way,” he admitted.

“Have they gone to fight the Nothing?” another student asked, her hand at her throat.

Twitterpat looked over at her, and half smiled. “We cannot discuss that. As for myself, I can only say that I have…personal concerns I need to attend to, and that I hope and expect to be back with you very shortly. In the meantime, I have prepared some work sheets for you to complete. There will not be a substitute teacher for this class, only a supervisory presence to ensure that you are in fact doing the required tasks during class and not spending the time discussing my absence from it among yourselves. You will be working on your own, and I know I can trust you to achieve these tasks by yourselves. You start tomorrow.”

After Twitterpat’s departure, the teacher disappearances ceased for a little while, but the mood at the school was getting darker and more frightening by the day.

Perhaps triggered by the absence of Twitterpat, who had quickly become one of her favorite teachers, or by the work that he had set
them to do, Thea’s mental filing system suddenly decided to access a memory she first thought had no real connection with the situation at hand. Indeed, the early moments of the dream that came to her were infused by a sense of comfort, almost of delight, because it took her back to the summer, and to that strange night she had spent with Grandmother Spider under the First World stars.

In the dream, Grandmother Spider had been in spider form when she had instructed Thea to make for the sparse piney woods on a ridge of high ground that rose on the horizon, a black shape against the cartwheels of light in the sky.

“Over there,” the spider said. “Can you see? On the rock face?”

Thea narrowed her eyes. The light in this place was disturbing, as bright almost as day, as if a full moon rode in the sky. “Where? You mean…is that a painting?”

There was a crude drawing on a sheer wall of rock straight ahead, a vast shape, barely formed—much like the cave paintings Thea had seen in books, back in her own world, except this one was about twenty times the size of anything she had ever seen before. It depicted, in
vague outline, a deerlike creature, its body one vast bulbous oval. It was supported by four legs, rendered in broad strokes, making them look like pillars. A short powerful neck sketched out in dark heavy strokes ended in another oval, a huge head bent down to the ground, as though the animal was either grazing or in the act of bowing to something. Feathered lines of what Thea supposed were meant to be antlers radiated from the front of the head. Although it was drawn in profile, it—somewhat disconcertingly—also bore two large dark circles, eyes, as if the beast was capable of looking through its own solid form and substance.

“What is it?” Thea said, staring in fascination. There was something about the drawing, a raw power, despite its almost childish simplicity.

“Big Elk,” Grandmother Spider said. “You’d better put me down again. I think I should probably be a little larger when he comes. He may not mean to hurt anybody, but sometimes he stands on you without knowing what he does….”

“What do I need to know?” Thea said softly, obeying.

Grandmother Spider, now a woman again, gave her an approving look.

“The perfect question,” she said. “Cheveyo would be proud of you. But it’s Big Elk you should talk to. And listen—here he comes….”

There was indeed a crashing of undergrowth, the sound of something immense moving with no regard to what stood in its path.

Thea stood her ground; this time it was Grandmother Spider who took the few steps back, melting into the shadows, becoming merely a voice and a presence.

“I bring you a guest,” she said, just as the animal she had named Big Elk stepped into the light.

Thea almost quaked. Big Elk stood almost twice as tall as she did. His legs were pillars of muscle and sinew, his head enormous, with a hint of white breath, like steam coming out of the nostrils, and eyes that glowed milkily in the starlight. Just as in the painting, they both seemed to be able to focus at once on an object to the side of the great head.

Thea had thought nothing could take her by surprise again, but the last thing she had expected this behemoth to do was speak, in a voice full of rich resonance and deep wisdom.

“Welcome,” it said.

“Thank you,” Thea said politely.

“Show her,” Grandmother Spider said.

The stag folded its magnificent front legs, kneeling in front of Thea. “Come,” it said, its voice trust and awe and serenity. “Climb on my back, child, and we shall see what we shall see tonight.”

There seemed no way to do what Big Elk asked without injuring its dignity in some fundamental way. Thea almost felt as though she should apologize as she stepped as lightly as she could onto one folded foreleg, grasped the base of a huge antler with one hand, and vaulted onto the animal’s neck, her feet dangling to either side just behind its ears. It rose to all four feet again, and Thea felt as if the earth itself had risen up beneath her.

Thea turned frantically to look at Grandmother Spider, seeking reassurance, but all she saw was the shadow of a smile under the trees, and words that came into her mind, gentle, like a caress:
Trust him.

“Hold on,” Big Elk said, and leaped.

Thea cried out, at first with panic, but that vanished in the blink of an eye. The fear of falling off evaporated almost instantly—what
ever this animal wanted to carry on its back, it would make sure that it stayed there. It would not,
could
not, be ridden unless it wished it so—and if it wished it so then the rider might as well sit back and relax.

It did not seem to Thea that they moved very fast—she would almost have called their pace a stately walk—but tree-shaped shadows passed by them in a blur, and Big Elk’s feet struck sparks where they met the ground.

“The Old One,” Big Elk said in that rich, resonant voice, “does not often come with visitors like you.”

“I am…a student,” Thea said. “I was sent here…to learn.”

“Ah,” said Big Elk. “One who seeks wisdom. Many have tried to win their way here, but most of them fail. It is your kind who make it this far.”

“Are we still in the First World?” Thea said, glancing up. The skies were darker than they had been in Grandmother Spider’s chaotic sphere, the stars, although more brilliant and far larger than they had any right to be, were still; things looked rather more like what she was used to and not Grandmother Spider’s fascinating universe.

“In a way,” Big Elk said. “It is
a
First World,
my First World, not
the
First World where the Old One dwells and everything began. I, too, began there—until I became what I am and was given this place for my own.”