Gift of the Unmage (9 page)

“Cheveyo hums it when he walks…or something like it, not quite the same. I hear him and I think I recognize the melody—but I don’t, it merely reminds me of this, of the real one, the one I know….”

“They are all real,” the spider said, “and they are all just echoes of the First Song. But it’s a path into a world—light and sound and life—you already held the light in your hands, child, and bent it to your will. Can you do that with the song of your spirit?”

Thea’s fingers curled, hooked a bit of starlit shadow, let it slide between her fingertips like silk. “Weave the song? Like I do this?”

“Weave the song,” the spider said, “
into
that. Weave what you hear into what you see. Let us see where the bridge that you make will take us.”

The stars sang to Thea as she reached into the shadows of the chasm, and something began to take shape underneath her fingers. Not a bridge—not a structure that arched out into the
nothingness at her feet and spanned her side of it with the far rim. Instead, what chose to form was a doorway—built from its shining keystone, set into thin air as high above Thea’s head as she could reach, and then flowing downward toward the ground. All of her life Thea had heard her aunt speak of “hearing” colors or “seeing” bird-song—once, even, she had piped up her wholehearted agreement to one of her aunt’s weird sense-shifting pronouncements—but she realized that she had never really known what Zoë had meant by it until this moment. Because suddenly she was inside that mystery, and the stars felt sharp under her hand like broken glass, and they smelled of silver and of forest green, and they sounded like a melody drawn gently from a flute. She could even taste the melody as it came pouring from the reeds of the instruments at a set of disembodied lips, and it tasted bittersweet, like dark chocolate. And she could see all this, because it was she who gave it form and substance, who molded this strange raw material into something that was darker than darkness and yet crowned with a star at the top, like a jewel.

“It’s a door,” Thea said, her voice full of won
der, as her hands made the final few motions and then stilled—and her creation hung before her, shimmering like a dream, solid and a little cool to the touch. “It’s a door….”

She suddenly collapsed onto her knees, one hand resting gently on her creation as though she could not bear to let go, as though only that gentle touch kept it real, kept it there. It was a dream come to life, a glory full of light and music, something she could not believe she had wrought with her own mind, her own hands.

And yet she had done it. The evidence refused to go away. In the face of her own awed disbelief in its existence, her doorway stood there, glimmering, a promise fulfilled, a potential met….

“A true weaver,” the spider said. “Now open it, and let us see where you have led us.”

Thea stroked the edge of her doorway with a gesture that spoke of both frustration and regret. “I don’t think I can.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Look at it,” Thea whispered, her voice full of tears.

It was a doorway, and it held a door, but the door had no handle or keyhole or hinges. It was a door that could not be opened.

“I think…,” Thea began, her fingers still gently caressing the starlight trapped in her creation, and then faltered. “I think it would take me…”

“What is it, child?” murmured the spider gently.

“I think just knowing how to open it would lead me to one of the true sacred places,” Thea whispered. She gave the Portal she had created a long, longing look, her gaze blurred with sudden tears. “I just wish that I could show this to…”

Grandmother Spider, who had taken her human form again to watch Thea build her doorway, inclined her head a fraction. “Your brothers,” she said, “are not your equals. Even if you were in competition with them, which you are not—or at least you do not have to be. The fact that they have not seen your gate does not erase the fact that you wove it.”

“But they will never see it,” Thea said. “And I’ll go back home and Frankie will
still
be better than me—because he can do magic, even if it is bad magic.”

“The Alphiri,” said Grandmother Spider, “did not come to bargain for him, though, did they?” She suddenly bent down and picked up something from the ground. Two somethings. She
appeared to weigh two things against each other in her closed hands. “Think of it this way,” she said. “On the one hand we have obsidian.” She opened her left hand, and in it gleamed a perfect obsidian flake, black and sharp-edged, polished into a gleam. “On the other, flint.” The other hand opened to show a flake of flint, dull in the starlight but sturdy, edged, lethal. “This is easy,” Grandmother Spider said, lifting the obsidian knife. “It’s easier to make. It flakes into blades as though it had been made for that purpose and no other. It polishes to a mirror gleam and it looks fine and valuable and even precious. But one mistake…” She brought down the obsidian knife blade she held, hard, and it struck a nearby boulder and shattered, shards falling from her fingers. “This, on the other hand, is tough. It takes a long time to make. And when you make it well…” The flint blade did not shatter as she brought it down in a glancing blow on another rock. Instead, it struck off a spark; the spark arced off the flint edge, and passed squarely through the middle of Thea’s Portal, vanishing instantly.

“Somewhere,” Thea said, “that might have been a thunderbolt.”

Grandmother Spider took her hand and closed it around the flint blade. “So, then,” she said. “Let us go and see if we can find the tree split by that lightning.”

1.

S
ILENCE COULD BE
as eloquent as any words, Thea discovered, the night she walked the starlit wilderness of the First World. The stars, big and brilliant, could not seem to make themselves stay still in the heavens. Some shimmered between near-fade to almost too bright to look upon, giving the impression of vivid restlessness, of just waiting for an opportunity to dive out of the sky and take off on some daring adventure. Others, apparently more confident, had already taken that leap—the sky was full of them, shooting stars tearing across the heavens like tiny comets, leaving trails of light. It was an odd and sometimes rather disturbing sky-scape, but Grandmother Spider did not describe, did not explain. She merely offered the occasional whis
pered word of direction, crouched behind Thea’s ear in her spider form.

She made just a single apparently extracurricular comment, and that seemed directed more at herself than at Thea.

“The Trade Codex,” she muttered at one point, her tiny spider’s voice heavy with disapproval for the book by which the Alphiri measured their own world, and every other world they set foot into. “They’d offer a living star money for its soul….”

But that one opening was enough for Thea. Cheveyo would have wept at the alacrity with which she leaped onto those words.

Questions. Always questions with you, Catori…

“Their
soul
? The stars are alive?” Thea said, her eyes raised to the heavens in wonder.

“Of course,” said Grandmother Spider serenely. “Would you like to meet one?”

Thea’s eyes were round as an owlet’s again. “
Meet
one? You mean, meet a star?”

The laugh came again, a high sweet giggle from the spider in Thea’s hair, the only comment Grandmother Spider had to make.

“I guess,” Thea said hesitantly, trying to imag
ine such an encounter, and spectacularly failing to wrap her mind around it.

Grandmother Spider laughed again, the laugh filled with the sheer joy of that moment. “Put me down, please,” she said. “Over there, on that rock.”

She changed back into her woman form and stood bathed in the starlight, both hands raised to the sky, her head flung back and her throat arched, humming a strange melody.

As though replying to her, the sky got very busy for a moment. Dozens of stars streaked across it chaotically, leaving random sparkles where two wakes crossed. It looked like a particularly spectacular fireworks display, stretching across the entire vault of the heavens, and then not one but two separate streaks of light changed direction and came directly to the spot where Thea and Grandmother Spider were waiting.

Grandmother Spider was suddenly bathed in a liquid glow of twin spills of sharp light, one shading into gold, the other a brilliant white. Two shadows, limned in different colors, stretched out behind her as the two stars touched down on the ground before her, gently, weightlessly. One of them, a burnished orange-gold,
resolved into a vaguely elongated humanoid shape, looking like something a cartoonist might have drawn to indicate the effect of a speed blur on a human body. He stood, tapping one of his very long feet, crossing and recrossing his arms in front of his chest in a manner that seemed to indicate annoyance. It looked as though his arms might brush the ground if he untangled them. The other, the white one, transformed from a diamond-bright shaft of light into a beautiful woman with hair that was spun starlight and eyes that were dark with the velvet blackness of the night sky and as full of shimmering starlight as that night would have been.

“Why do you summon us?” demanded the starman. His voice, in a way that Thea knew her aunt would have understood instantly and perfectly, was pure light; it was not so much heard as seen, the words taking shape in the air like fireflies.

“To meet a guest,” Grandmother Spider said. She gestured for Thea to step forward, and Thea, her eyes glowing with wonder and pleasure, obeyed.

“Who are you?” said the starman crustily.

“I’m…Thea,” Thea said, at a loss.

“I am Maia,” said the starwoman. “You might know me as one of the Seven Sisters. What your people—at least I
think
I know your people—have named the Pleiades. I am happy to make your acquaintance, child of earth.” She glanced at her companion. “He is Aldebaran,” she added, with a degree of impishness, as though that explained everything. “He follows. Where I or my sisters go, he follows.”

Aldebaran chose to ignore this, and instead looked Thea up and down. She felt an urgent need to curtsy; he had such an air of an old-world king demanding absolute obedience from his subject. The impression that he managed to convey was that she had transgressed by simply having raised her eyes to look at him.

“You’re just a snip of a girl,” he said. “And you aren’t of the First World. I’d know, there would be a light about you. What’s she doing here, Old Grandmother?”

“Learning,” said Grandmother Spider.

“She
does
have the light,” Maia said, reaching out a hand that almost but not quite touched Thea on the cheek. Thea felt the warmth of it, the pure sweet heat, as it passed close to her face. “And I know whose light it is. Why did you not
call him, Old One? He was always your own companion.”

“Who?” Thea said, unable to hold back the word.

Grandmother Spider shot her a look that was almost reproach, but Aldebaran gave a sharp bark of a laugh, scattering light motes everywhere, and the starwoman smiled again.

“Tawaha, of course,” Maia said. “The one whom you might better know as the Sun—your Sun, the star whose light is in you, in your world. With whose light this Old One created all the worlds in which your kind draw breath.”

The words were simple, on the surface, but there was something underneath them. Thea’s mind reached in and unraveled the images hidden in Maia’s deceptive simplicity:
Are there other worlds? Where other kinds of folk live?

And then she blinked. Of course there were. She knew that. There were worlds of the Faele and of the Alphiri and of the Dwarrowim and of who knew how many other different races whose paths had never passed into the human realm. Perhaps never even could. Thea suddenly had a vision of world upon world peeling away from a central kernel of primeval light, like skins off an
onion, each full of its own wonders.

Aldebaran chose to break the moment. Unable to leave without at least a modicum of graciousness as befitted a great lord dealing with his lowly subjects, he unfurled his long arms until they hung by his sides, almost touching the ground, and gave Thea a shallow courteous bow from the waist. He cleared his throat portentously. “Brightness to you, child,” he said. He spun on his heel, turning himself into a small tornado of warm golden light, and then the tornado detached itself from the ground and hurled itself back up into the heavens. It diminished fast, and very soon it became impossible to tell it apart from any other shooting stars still careening madly across the black sky.

“She should meet Tawaha,” Maia murmured, still smiling at Thea. “After all, he
is
her father.”

Thea shot a look of what was almost panic in Grandmother Spider’s direction, and Maia laughed.

“In a manner of speaking,” she amended.

Grandmother Spider’s mouth curled into a small answering smile. She gave Thea a reassuring nod.

Maia raised one of her elegant hands in a
wave of farewell, and then her hair brightened into a brilliance that quickly became too dazzling to look on directly, and she vanished into a scintillating light sphere hovering a little way above the ground. After a moment she, too, was gone, the bright sphere only a flicker, one star among many. Here, in the chaotic sky of the First World, the constellations had yet to be formed into the shapes that hung in her own sky. Back home, maybe, Thea could look for the Pleiades, and find them, and perhaps even pick out the individual star who was the beautiful woman with fiery hair. Not here, though. Not yet.

Besides, she had far more important questions.

“Tawaha?” she said. “The Sun?
Our
Sun?”

“Yes, you would know him as such.”

“But what did she mean, exactly…?”

“Later, maybe,” said Grandmother Spider, almost primly. She motioned for Thea to hold out her hand, and was once more the small spider, nestling in Thea’s cupped palm, almost invisible in the diffuse light; Thea lifted her up to her customary perch, and felt the tiny spider feet on her skin for a moment as the spider climbed up to nestle in her hair. “Go on. That way.”

“But I don’t understand,” Thea said, begin
ning to walk again, obeying the spider’s whispered directions. “Why would a star want to send itself out…to send a part of itself out…why would they want to walk a world?”

“Many of the worlds they walk, they have created,” Grandmother Spider said, sounding solemn and pensive, as though she spoke of sacred things. “These worlds, and the beings upon them—and there are thousands upon thousands of such worlds—they have spun out of the outer darkness, with the breath of those stars to give them life, with the stars singing the song that made the seeds wake and the plants grow and the beasts run, and the people laugh and dream and tell legends of how it all came to be.”

“Like Tawaha,” Thea said. “And you.”

“Yes,” Grandmother Spider said. “It was long ago, the dawn of our time. But there is still love between us, no matter how many mountains are lifted from the earth and ground back down again into the sands of the centuries.” She sighed, a tiny spider sigh, almost inaudible except for a slight gasp at the end of the last word.

“When did you last see Tawaha?” Thea asked.

“Perhaps,” Grandmother Spider said, “too
long ago. Or was it just yesterday…?” Thea felt the spider feet tickle her ear as the spider climbed up to a better position. “Time is so different here, child.”

Overhead, in this particular world’s sky, a waxing moon hung overhead, nearly full. It looked almost the same as the one that Thea had used to weave into her ribbon of sunset light, but there was something marginally strange about it, as though time had moved…backward…as though the moon had yet to reach that bright-orb fullness that had been Mura’ta, the Grass Moon, under which she had entered Grandmother Spider’s house. The moon that Cheveyo had told her meant calm, serenity, a sense of belonging—all of which she had felt, all of which had been real—but now it was different, it was as though her blood was roused again, as though the whole conflict of her magicless existence in her home world had been turned on its head.

It still made no sense at all to Thea, but something had suddenly become very obvious. Galathea Georgiana Winthrop, Double Seventh, the most magical of the magical, apparently did no magic in her world not because she could not
do so—but because she chose not to do so.

And Thea had no inkling as to the reasons why.

The air was humming with warnings and a vague but pervasive unease. The moon was wrong. The worlds of her father, of Cheveyo, Grandmother Spider’s First World—all had collided somehow and she was in the center of it all: she, Thea, the Double Seventh who never was…

“The moon is different,” was all she said out loud.

“Yes,” Grandmother Spider said, lifting her eyes to it. “That is Sui’ta, the Milk Moon, and I can see it stirring your blood.”

“But that would mean I’ve been here nearly a month,” Thea said in a small voice.

“Time,” Grandmother Spider said, “does what it needs to do. You have woken to many disquieting things, and it was no longer the proper time for Mura’ta to be in the sky. She was there when she needed to be, the Grass Moon, because she led you into my house and you knew you belonged there. Sui’ta takes you on. And soon, soon, that will be past, too, and the Moon of Thirsty Ground will light your way. And you will gain strength from it.”

“But that would mean…,” Thea began, and then stopped.

“Yes?” Grandmother Spider said gently, reaching out to smooth Thea’s hair away from her face.

“It seems that here…you call the moon, the right moon, to come when it needs to be there….”

“Yes,” Grandmother Spider said again.

“In my world, the moon is fixed,” Thea said obstinately. “It waxes and it wanes and there is a pattern and you can build calendars on it…. When you call a full moon Mura’ta, and call that the time of belonging, where I come from you come into that time and then out of it and in time it will come again, but the time is fixed and unyielding—you can’t have a Grass Moon one day and a Milk Moon the next, any more than you can walk into a place and feel you belong there and call whatever moon there is in the sky by the name of Mura’ta….”

“And why not?” said Grandmother Spider, smiling. “Sometimes your world comes with too many rules.”

“But…”

“Hush,” said Grandmother Spider. “Let it
pass. You will understand, when the Moon of Thirsty Ground comes for you.”

2.

T
he sky was brightening in the east as the shooting stars began to fade away into the gray pearly light of morning. It seemed to Thea that she had spent the whole night walking, sometimes with Grandmother Spider beside her in human form and sometimes as the small spider hidden in the hair tucked behind Thea’s ear. She remembered far too many things from this the night that was not bound by normal laws of space and time; she thought she remembered sleeping briefly, as though she had spent an hour or two outside herself watching her sleeping form stretched out in the starlight. But even that was a memory she could not quite trust—it was so unreal, so dreamlike, that she could not be certain that she had actually slept and not just thought about the possibility of sleeping. In some ways it felt like she was being filled with information, like a computer would be back in her own world—information that waited to be organized into files and folders and given passwords so that the material could be easily
accessed later, at her convenience when she needed it.

Her mind did not feel tired, though. It was full of images, visions, ideas…and, inevitably, questions. Grandmother Spider didn’t seem to mind those as much as Cheveyo, and would answer willingly, but almost always cryptically.