Gift of the Unmage (24 page)

But first, there was that other boat, the friends she had wanted to be at her side.

“What took you so long?” Thea murmured, breaking off her humming.

“You’ve stirred a hornet’s nest in your wake,” Terry said. “
You
try doing something on the quiet that would bring everyone down on you like a ton of bricks if they knew what you were up to. And besides…you left us a pretty thin trail to follow.”

“How did you find me?”

“Once the uproar began and the marines were called in to get you, we figured out what you’d done,” Tess said. “And we went straight for the computer lab. If you think we took a long time, you try figuring out what ‘Magpie Hunt’ means without any clues.”

“You had clues,” Thea said. “You had Magpie herself.”

“She came
after
we found the computer,” Ben said.

There were things to be done, but Thea was fascinated despite herself. “I left a trail? On the computer?”

“Something like that,” Tess said. “You’d better be careful where you leave your base computer, if you do this again.”

“Or leave someone behind to watch your back,” Ben said reproachfully. “Why did you go alone?”

“Because…it was something I needed to do, something that was left for me to do, and none of you seemed to want any part of it,” Thea said. “But, Magpie…,” she continued, “this is an empty ocean. Perhaps I didn’t do it the right way. There is only the ocean, and me, and the Nothing.”

“The whales will come,” Magpie said, smiling.

“Ancestral magic?” asked Thea, after a moment.

“Yes. I think so. At last. This is for me to do,” Magpie said, and her voice was as luminous as the star she had bound on her brow.

“Then call it. Call the whale,” Thea said.

And Magpie sat up and closed her eyes and lifted her voice in a long keening cry that pierced
the mist like a knife and traveled out over the empty ocean.

Which was suddenly not empty anymore.

Thea could not suppress a small gasp as a huge gray body rolled in the dark waters beside her, almost close enough to touch, and rocked her tiny boat in the wake of its passing.

“It’s here,” Ben said, curling his hand tightly around his harpoon.

The fog had retreated, and the ocean opened up before them. A ways away, far enough for them not to be swamped by it, close enough to see its form and shape and to call it by its spirit name, a whale’s sleek dark shape breached the water and then fell back with a spray of white foam.

But there were more than one. A second whale breached. A third. A splash off to the side in the fog that might have been yet another.

Thea’s eyes danced from one huge shape to the next, uncertain. “Which one is it, Magpie?” she asked urgently.
“Which one?”

“It will tell you,” Magpie said. She had broken off her cry as the whales came and now sat watching them, her eyes very bright.

Beyond the pod of spirit-whales, revealed at last by the retreating mists, a dense dark cloud
was forming, heavy with its scent of rot and corruption. Thea gagged at the memory of its presence inside her, but reached for it, hooked a strand of it with the index finger of her right hand, holding her breath. When the foremost whale breached again, Thea reached for it with the other hand, across the distance and empty ocean that separated her from the whale, and somehow touched its warm skin, feeling its life cling to her fingers much like strands of sunset light once did back in the desert. She brought her hands together, laced her fingers together into a lattice, wove the warmth and the darkness together: the whale’s gift of life with the essence of death that was the Nothing.

“Be One,” she murmured, tangling life and death, watching the Nothing shudder and shred, watching the Whale suddenly twist and fall back into the water with a gracelessness foreign to its kind.

A keening cry of outrage, of betrayal, of anger and sorrow and pain, ripped the air. Thea did not know, could not tell, whether it came from the Nothing or the whale. Or perhaps from both.

The surface of the ocean trembled, and was still.

“It’s gone,” Ben said, scanning the quiet sea, holding his harpoon at attention. The fog was lifting; somewhere far above them there was a hint of brightening, as though sunshine was trying to fight its way through the shroud of cloud. “They are all gone.”

“What did you
do
?” Tess asked.

“How did you do that?” Terry said in the same breath.

“It will come back,” Magpie murmured, her eyes closed, her hands together. “It will come to the call. That is its nature.”

The waters surged beneath them as something huge and angry passed right below both boats, and then surged again as it circled around once more. They glimpsed a ridged back, a dorsal fin breaking the surface, and then it was gone again.

Magpie began her keening song again, very softly, as if singing a child to sleep.

“The Whale’s nature,” Ben said, and they had all started thinking of the whale as the Whale, as the opposite to the Nothing, as that in which the Nothing was now confined. “How was it changed by the Nothing? Did you even succeed, Thea?”

“Oh, yes,” Thea said, feeling suddenly tired, as though a weight had been laid on her shoulders
that made her stagger with the load.

The need is great, but can you live with asking another to pay the price for it?

Grandmother Spider’s gentle voice came back to Thea, and she all but wept for pity. She had taken the Whale’s gentle nature and sense of noble sacrifice and had made them into tools of destruction—it was the only way, but it was betrayal, it was a twisting of everything that was genuine and true.

What if the Whale refused the burden she had laid upon it?

Ahead of them, the waters broke again. The Whale—there was only one now, the One Whale, the rest of the pod might have been pure illusion for all they knew—was swimming away from them, quite fast.

“Follow,” Thea said, picking up her harpoon, which had turned back into an oar.

The twins bent to their own oars. The two small coracles skimmed the surface of the ocean, following a sort of wake left by the dorsal fin of the whale that was slicing through the waters before them. It led them for a way, sometimes vanishing for an instant to come up behind them or below them, rocking them dangerously,
threatening to upset them, but always it returned to the front, swam ahead a little way, circled, thrashed the water with fin and fluke, fought with itself and the black rider that Thea had saddled its soul with, raced away, challenging them to follow.

Two things were warring in the body of the Whale—the spirit that had come to the ancestral call, ready to offer itself, and that malignant “other,” the dark foreign matter that had been implanted into it, wanting to deliver only death, not life—never life. It ran from the Hunters, from itself, from the Hunters again, and kept returning, being called to the music it had already accepted as its fate. It struggled and fought until finally something broke and it stopped, floating, exhausted, right in front of the two boats. Thea could see its eye from where she sat, and there was something in it that was infinitely old and wise and sad.

I came when you called, as I have always done. Why? Why have you done this to me? It is not the ancient bargain between our kinds. It is not clean.

Thea’s breath caught in sorrow that she should have to kill a thing like this.
I am sorry. I
am so sorry. I needed a strength that was a great and ancient good, and more powerful than my enemy. I needed the strength and the power of that bargain of which you speak. I needed the ancestral magic to cross with the newest magic of all. Either, by itself, is not enough. Together, they were. Barely. But they were enough. I am in your debt, Ancient One.

A different voice then, a scream of hate and fury.
I WILL NOT! I WILL NOT BE BOUND! I WILL NOT BE BOUND BY THIS!

For a moment Thea could smell the carrion stench again, and the world darkened, like the falling of night, the air thick around her. She felt bile rise at the back of her throat; it was suddenly hard to breathe. The Nothing may have started out being a sending of the Alphiri, but here and now, it was a beast in its own right, a monster that knew itself, that roared with a rage all its own at being bound.

I AM AIR AND DARKNESS! I AM POWER! I AM THE SEEKER, SENT OUT TO FIND! I AM THE HUNGER! I WILL NOT BE BOUND BY THIS!

And then it was suddenly gone, chopped in mid-shriek, as if suddenly gagged—there was
still a sense of outrage, of frenzy, but it was an impotent rage, locked behind bars of something stronger than steel.

The voice that spoke again was that of the Whale, pure, untainted.

I come, as I have always come. I understand. It was necessary. I bring the victory of life—and that is what I have always done, after all.

There was a light in the Whale’s eye, a shimmer that played around its great head, and the trace of darkness that was the Nothing was gathered and locked away in a safe place, from which it could never escape. It was a great load, but the Whale would bear it. It had chosen to honor the old bargain.

Take me. Take me now….

They both heard it, felt it, Thea and Ben, holding on to their harpoons—and they acted as one.

The harpoons quivered in the Whale’s great body, looking far too flimsy to do any damage—but then, through the mist, the ocean broke on a gray pebbly shore, and the ocean took the Whale and floated the great body forward, toward land. The boats followed, crunching onto the pebbles as the Whale was borne in and beached gently in the shallows.

The first pale fingers of the sun had finally pierced the sea fog completely, turning it from dull, dark gray into a pale shimmering silver-white veil of cloud and then shredding even that until glints of sunlight began to sparkle on the waves lapping at the shore. The air smelled clean, salty, fresh with light and morning.

Where you are and where light is…

“What now?” Ben whispered, looking at the Whale’s lifeless body with tears of pity standing in his eyes. “I hated killing it. I feel as though I have an innocent’s death on my hands.”

“You were one of the Hunt,” Magpie said, and her own face was etched with sorrow, but also with a fierce pride. “This was not death, but the seed of resurrection. Look.”

A small band of women picked their way across the beach, keening quietly as they walked, carrying sharp flensing blades in their hands.

“We can leave it to them now,” Magpie said. “Our part of the bargain is done.”

“Did we do it?” asked Ben. “Did we really kill the Nothing? Can it have been that simple?”

“Who said it was simple?” Thea said. She felt like crying, and yet some of that pride that Magpie wore so brightly was shining in her own face.

“Isn’t it time we got back?” asked Tess. “How long were we here? They’re probably looking for all of us by now, they’ll tear the school down brick by brick if they have to….”

“Home,” Thea said.

As the beach and the body of the sacrificed Whale and the gleam of sunlight on the ocean began to fade around them, Ben flung out a hand and pointed into the shadows of the fir forest that marched almost down to the edge of the water.

“Look!”

It was almost too late, but Thea thought she glimpsed what he had seen: a small knot of shadowy shapes, drifting away through the trees, released into freedom. One of them, with graying hair tied into a straggly ponytail, might even have been Twitterpat’s ghost.

The Nothing was gone. The spirits of the people it had taken were free.

And then the five were back in the computer lab, all of them, sitting before a computer, scrolling gently down a document open on its monitor. Thea glimpsed the word
WHALE
, and then suddenly, there was a noise at the door of the classroom, and she grabbed for the mouse, dragged
the cursor up to the menu bar, and clicked on
DELETE
.

DO YOU WANT TO SAVE CHANGES TO DOCUMENT
? the computer dialog box asked politely. “No!” murmured Thea, clicking on the right button.

The screen blinked, the document winked out of existence, all record of a now-vanished virtual world erased, just as the door opened to allow a handful of frantic adults inside, led by Thea’s Aunt Zoë.

“That should be erased off the hard disk,” Thea whispered as she turned, catching Terry’s eye.

“Leave it to me,” he said.

“What is going on here?” demanded the principal, only half a step behind Zoë.

“We’re just finishing our assignments,” Tess said, with fingers firmly crossed behind her back.

“You all seem very eager to do so,” the principal said suspiciously. “Working after hours. Show me.”

“I’ve just shut down, sir, but I’d be happy to,” Terry said smoothly, swinging to another station and flicking the
ON
switch. The computer began whirring into life. “I’m the only one who’s fin
ished,” he added. “My sister was stuck, and Thea was nearly done with hers in class this afternoon, and we came to try and get some work done while it was quiet. Twi…I mean, Mr. Wittering gave us all access codes, before he…went away.”

“You don’t take computer science,” said another of the adults, a teacher who had watched over Twitterpat’s quiet class several times since his death, staring at Magpie and Ben.

“I hate computers,” Magpie said, and smiled.

“I was just keeping my friends company,” Ben said. And sneezed unexpectedly, shaking his head to clear his watering eyes.

“Thea,” Zoë said, her voice shaking very slightly, “are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Thea said, presenting an expression of angelic sweetness and innocence to meet her aunt’s frightened eyes.

“All right,” the principal said sharply. “We are
all
done here for the night. You will all pack up, please, and leave the classroom at once. And we will discuss this again tomorrow. As for the code, after-hours access to this place ends as of right now. I will see about changing the security code tonight. Out, all of you. Back to your
rooms, please, now. Thea Winthrop, your aunt wants to speak with you. You may use Mr. Wittering’s office, Miss Cox, if you wish.”