Worldweavers: Cybermage (17 page)

She saw the two Teslas come apart, the ghost ripping itself out of the other body, stumbling away, wavering, weak, almost shredding itself. Thea frantically typed a reset on her keypad, wrenching them all away.

They were back again at the moment before the experiment. Tesla was shaking, his eyes wild.

“I had forgotten,” he said, “how badly this had hurt.”

“Something felt different,” Magpie said. “There was…an energy. And then, for a moment, there was…a possibility. I could feel it. It changed back in less time than it takes to blink—but there was a difference. And there was no bird there, when you broke things off. Just for a moment, there wasn’t.”

“What do you think?” Thea said, looking back at Tesla.

“I do not know. I do not know.” He was still shaking, trying to calm himself. “There…may have been. I cannot tell. I only know I felt it all again. Felt it…just like it was the first time. Except that this time it is worse, because back then he…I…never even knew just what it was that had been lost, squandered, thrown away. Now I know. And knowing makes it worse. I did not know that it would be possible for this to be worse, but it is.”

“Can you,” Thea said faintly, “do it again?”

Tesla skewered her with a gaze that was a bolt of blue lightning.

“Child, you have no idea what you ask of me.”

“All I know is this: If
we
sensed a difference…if
you
thought you did…one more time and the pain could be only a bad memory. You could have it back. All of it.”

Tesla stared at her. “
You
would do this? If it were you?”

“I have no idea,” Thea said. “Would I allow my soul to be shredded as I am asking you to let yours be shredded? How could I know? I never had to choose.”

“You have spirit, and courage, and integrity,” Tesla said. “Many would have given the easy answer, and lied. Very well. I will try it again.”

Thea flushed, using the pretext of fiddling with her keypad to avoid looking up at Tesla in the wake of the compliment. “Ready,” she said faintly. “Here we go again. Magpie, we need to know
exactly
when…”

The real Tesla entered; the ghost Tesla tensed his shoulders and approached his other body again. The events unrolled inexorably, as they had already done before—the flame, the bird appearing at the edge of the roof, the vanishing and the multiplying of the pigeons, and then it was over once more, and the two girls strained forward to see the platform.

For a fraction of a second it remained empty, as it had done the previous time—and then the bird appeared on it again, the pigeon that had been given Tesla’s Fire Element.

Except this time it was not on its back, its legs up in the air, dead. The pigeon was on its feet, staggering weakly, wings spread out for balance and support, emitting small, wounded noises.

“It’s alive,”
Thea breathed.

“But it looks in bad shape,” Magpie said. She ran over to where Tesla had gently gathered up the pigeon into his cupped hands, and reached out with her own. She touched the pigeon’s small head, an improbable shade of lilac-tinged gray, and stroked it gently. “Let me see,” she whispered to Tesla. “Let me hold him.”

He hesitated—the ghost could hear her, see her, but the real Tesla could not, and it was hard to say which of the two controlled the man’s body.

“His heart,” Tesla said, through lips that barely opened. “His heart is beating so fast…so slow…the heartbeat is not right…”

Even as he spoke, the pigeon freed one of its wings from his fingers, and Tesla loosened his hold a little so that the other wing would be free too. The pigeon roused, and its wings beat an astonishingly strong tattoo against both Tesla’s hands and Magpie’s. It turned its head, meeting Tesla’s eyes and then Magpie’s. The bird and the girl gazed at each other, and
Magpie almost sobbed as she reached out for it, her fingers on the sides of the pigeon’s head.

And then the bird simply folded, its wings fluttering down without any further control to splay at an awkward angle over human wrists and fingers; its head lolled on a neck suddenly boneless, coming to rest gently on the web between Tesla’s left thumb and forefinger, and it was still. A couple of small feathers floated slowly down to the floor at Tesla’s feet.

“Wait,” Magpie said, unconsciously echoing Tesla’s own words. “Please…oh, please…”

It all seemed to take a very long time, but in reality only a few seconds had passed before Thea came thumping down on her knees beside the two of them and the dead bird.

“Is it—” she began breathlessly, and then broke off as she looked at Magpie’s stricken face. “Oh, God. Was there nothing you could do?”

Magpie shook her head mutely, her index finger gently stroking the curve of the pigeon’s neck where it lay cradled in Tesla’s hands.

“Was there even a chance…?”

“I don’t know,” Magpie whispered. “I felt it go. I’m not even entirely sure what killed it. It was
just…gone. As though…as though it was not meant to live in this world at all.”

Tesla stirred, gathering the pigeon a little closer, but he remained silent.

Thea, torn between a terrible pity and a need to understand, to
know
, hesitated to intrude on a grief that he was wearing like armor. After a moment she, too, reached out and touched the still-warm body of the bird.

“But it was alive this time,” she whispered. “
Alive
. We made it that far. Maybe…”

There was a disconcerting wrench in perspective; the real Tesla did not move, bent protectively over the pigeon, his hands frozen in position with the bird’s head pillowed on his thumb, but the ghost Tesla, still contained in the same body, lifted his head to meet Thea’s eyes, and one ghostly hand appeared to leave the pigeon’s body and came up in a gesture intended to silence her.

“No,” the ghost Tesla said, in a voice that sliced into Thea like a knife. “I cannot do this again. I cannot hold him and feel his life going from him, feel his heart beating inside of him as though it was bursting. This, too, was part of me. It hurts in too many ways. Not again. I cannot.”

“But you lived for forty years or more after this day,” Thea whispered, tears standing in her eyes. “If we can bring back light and life to the rest of your days…”

“I did this,” Tesla said. “I have already lived with it. I will have to continue to live with it. It was a grievous mistake on my part, and as long as I am here that death is with me. Every time we have repeated this a little bit more of me has died. No, Thea.” It was the first time he had addressed her by name. The ghost Tesla bent his head again, let his hand drop, folding back into the real Tesla body holding the bird in his hands. “What is, is. I will pay the price of my folly.”

Magpie stumbled to her feet. “Give him some space,” she murmured. “It’s hard enough to say good-bye to the simple creatures who cross your life like shooting stars—here one day, gone the next. That thing that he is holding is so much more than that.”

Thea became aware, as she accepted the pull of Magpie’s hand, that Tesla was humming a quiet, simple tune over the pigeon he held in his lap; the hum turned into words, but they were strange words, in a language she did not know, perhaps the
language that Tesla had spoken from the cradle.

He seemed to be oblivious of the two of them, to the room that surrounded them, to the smell of Elemental fires that still lingered in the air. He was alone with that part of him that was gone, singing a part of his soul to a sleep from which it would never wake again.

“This might have been a very bad idea,” Thea said, her throat tight with tears.

Magpie stroked her arm gently a few times. “You tried your best,” she said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Thea gave her a small smile. “I had hoped that with
you
here…You have helped so many creatures before, I hoped having
you
here would make a difference.”

“Against Elemental magic?” Magpie said. “You heard him speak of it. What chance would I and the small things that I can do have against a force like that?”

“They’re not small. Even if they were, it’s the smaller things that get past the great blundering forces, slip through the cracks that something grander and flashier might never even see.”

“That was before we came here,” Magpie murmured. “Before we saw him do that. I think maybe I
could have done something if I had been stronger, or more experienced. You saw the way that bird looked at me. It knew me. We could have come to an understanding, the pigeon and I—but on the other side of that…was Elemental magic.”

They heard a noise and turned to see Tesla getting to his feet. He still held the pigeon in his hands, but awkwardly now, as though he didn’t quite know what to do with it. Without a word, Magpie unwrapped the black silk shawl tied around her shoulders and folded it into a smaller triangle, stepping up to Tesla and offering it as a cradle. He appeared to look straight through Magpie, as though she were not there—which, in a sense, she was not; the real Tesla’s body was not aware of her at all. But the ghost Tesla was still partly in charge of that body, and to him Magpie was a real and solid presence. It was the ghost Tesla who finally took control and gently placed the pigeon in the shawl, nodding mute thanks as Magpie threw a corner of the fabric over the bird. Empty-handed, with his arms now hanging at his sides, Tesla looked lost, dazed.

“I’m sorry,” Thea said. “I’m so sorry. I really thought that we might turn it…”

“I appreciate the attempt,” he said.

He stepped
out
of the real Tesla’s body, and the real Tesla stumbled away toward his workbench, catching himself on it as though it was the only thing holding him upright. The ghost Tesla remained where the real man had been.

“What was that tune you were singing?…It was quite lovely.”

“When they asked me to show my magic tricks at the Chicago fair,” Tesla said, apparently arbitrarily, “I chose to twist fire into letters, make a name glow in the dark. What name did I choose? There might have been many—but I picked one, the name of a different kind of wizard, a poet who brought many lovely dreams into my head when I was young. His name was Zmaj, and that means ‘dragon’ in your language. It is his name I put up in lights in Chicago, a city he had never heard of, had no idea even existed.” He paused. “One of his poems was set to music, as a lullaby. It was sung to me and my brother and my sisters in our cribs.
Tiho, noci, moje sunce spava
. ‘Quiet, night, for my sunshine is asleep’—my sunshine, my child, the one that I love. The poem speaks of nightingales weaving a coverlet out of their song, to tuck around the sleeping child so that she sleeps safe, and doesn’t wake.” He turned his head,
to where Magpie stood with the pigeon bundled up in black silk. “It seemed appropriate.”

A faint ping from Thea’s keypad claimed her attention, and she glanced down almost unwillingly. Skimming the message on her screen, she brought her head up again with a sudden hope.

“It’s Tess,” she said. “She’s heard from the others. They sent a message that they need snatching out of New York—it’s urgent, like they’re in danger or something, but she says it sounds as though they’ve done it. Give me a minute, I need to get them out of there.”

“Good,” said Magpie faintly, her arms folded protectively around a dead bird draped in black silk. “I could use some good news.”

“I
HAVE GOOD NEWS AND
bad news,” Ben said.

Thea had gathered them all together—Tess and Terry from the Nexus room at the school, Ben and Kristin snatched from the shattered hotel room in contemporary New York, herself and Magpie from the wreckage of Colorado—and brought them back to Tesla’s world, to the New Yorker hotel room as it was in his time, a bank of old-fashioned filing cabinets against one wall and the pigeon coop in the window.

Tesla himself presided over the meeting, sitting in his favorite leather armchair, gazing at the six of them with stern blue eyes.

Kristin stepped out from behind Ben with the birdcage held in both hands. The two pigeons inside were awake, and fluttering about.

“Great! You got them!” Tess exclaimed, and then
did a double take. “Two—there’s two—shouldn’t there be—?”

“That’s the bad news,” Ben said.

“Is that one dead too?” Magpie gasped.

“Worse,” Kristin said, hanging her head. “And it’s all my fault.”

“No, it isn’t,” Ben said. “I had my share of stupid ideas. You were just doing what you were there for.”

Thea gave a small exasperated sigh. “What
happened?!
”

Kristin and Ben exchanged a troubled look, and Terry frowned at them. “That bad, was it?”

“Corey has the Water pigeon,” Ben said.

But Kristin was shaking her head. “No, he doesn’t. Corey
took
the Water pigeon. The Alphiri
have
it.”

In his armchair, Tesla roused. “Have it. How do you mean, have it?”

“Your other self knows,” Ben said. “You were—
he
was—right there.”

Tesla was gazing at the pigeons in the cage. “Air…and Earth,” he said. “I could barely believe that they still existed. That you would find them. That they would come to
you
, and that they never, in forty long years, came back to me at all. Not even
to glimpse them. That which I did must have been ill done indeed, if pieces of my own soul chose to stay away from me for so long…and come to you, when you went to seek them.”

“You’re wrong,” Ben said. “They came to you—they
all
came to you. When we were in the park, you were covered with birds, as though they were celebrating your return. And when these came, it was you who took them, your hand that they came to. They did not desert you, in the end.”

“Forty lonely years,” Tesla murmured, reaching out to the cage and pushing a couple of long fingers through the wire. One of the pigeons sidled closer, cooing louder, and rubbed his head on Tesla’s hand.

“Yes,” he said to it, his voice suddenly very soft and gentle, his index finger ruffling the feathers at the back of the bird’s neck, “I am very happy to see you, too.”

Thea suddenly flashed back to Tesla’s last lullaby to another bird, lying still in his hands; she met Magpie’s eyes, briefly, and could see the same thought reflected there. She cleared her throat, but before she could speak Terry stirred.

“Humphrey won’t be happy,” he said. “Have you
been in touch with him, Thea? He wants to know what’s going on. He’s been bugging me several times a day—e-mail, phone, once even a personal visit.”

“He phoned us in New York. Twice. And I know he had an FBM shadow on us—it wasn’t just the Alphiri that were following us around,” said Ben. “For all I know, he might already know about the results of the New York expedition.”

“This Humphrey May,” Tesla said. “What exactly is his own role in all of this? In my own experience with the Federal Bureau of Magic, whenever they did something it was for their own reasons, not anyone’s well-being. I am a little disturbed that he is involved so deeply in all of this.”

“He thought it might be possible to get you back,” Thea said. “To give back what you’d lost. To
reclaim
you. I know he was doing it for his own reasons, but when I said I would help find those pigeons of yours, I told him I was doing it for
you
, not for him. All I wanted to do was try and set you free; I don’t know what he wanted, exactly, or what he would take instead of that if he didn’t get it.”

“He would have taken you,” Tesla said shrewdly. “He was betting on one of us. I would be very careful around the FBM, my dear.”

“I wouldn’t say you were far wrong,” Terry said, “even though my uncle runs the place. But Thea, we need to do
something
. He’s been a confounded nuisance, and I can’t tell him to bug off; he’s technically my boss.”

“What would the Alphiri want with that pigeon they stole?” Tess asked.

“Hold it for ransom, maybe, or hold it over our heads as a threat. They will find a way to make a profit on the situation,” Terry said grimly. “They’ll threaten to wring its neck if we don’t produce its fellows, or Tesla.”

“I thought they did not steal,” Kristin said, clutching her cage as though her mere touch would protect the precious birds inside it. “But Corey…”

“Exactly. Corey.” Thea tossed her hair back in a small frustrated gesture. “They stole nothing. They
bought
the pigeon from Corey. And Corey had no compunction about stealing. None at all. Well, two can play at that game.”

“Oh?” Ben said sharply.

“Who knows someone who’s got Tersii in the house?” Thea said, turning to her friends.

She was greeted with five sets of blank stares.

“The Faele Cleaner Clan?” Tess echoed. “The
imps that do the housework when nobody’s looking, and as long as everybody pretends not to notice?”

“Those,” Thea said, beginning to grin.

“But they’re the lowest Faele rank there is—they have no power at all. What do you want with the Tersii?”

“Uh,” Ben said, hesitating. “I don’t know, not for sure, but my father’s lab is always immaculate, and I never see
him
tidying up. It
could
be one of the Tersii, but I don’t know for sure.”

“Worth a try,” Thea said. “I hope it’s the helpful kind and not the malicious tribe. Getting tangled up with those would be all we need right now.”

“
Tersii,
for heaven’s sake? Why do you want to get tangled up with the Faele anyway? Don’t we have enough trouble on our plate?” Tess said.

But Tesla was wearing a wolfish smile. “I think I understand,” he said. “Good luck.”

“Wait for me here,” Thea said. “Ben, can you describe your father’s lab for me?”

“I can do better than that. Take me with you, and I’ll get you there directly,” Ben said.

“All right, then. The sooner we—”

“Wait.”

They turned to see Magpie standing a little apart
from them, laying down a small silk-wrapped bundle.

“Take me with you too,” she said.

Thea stared at her and then nodded.

“Okay,” she said. “The rest of you, wait here. Come on, Ben.”

She typed something on her wrist pad, showed it to Ben, who murmured assent, and hit
ENTER
.

The three of them found themselves in an empty laboratory, just at the instant that someone had switched off the overhead lights and was softly closing the door behind them. They heard the snick of a lock, and then they were alone in a large room, with a couple of safety lights over two of the benches and the muted glow of the light in the fume cupboard. It glinted on glassware—some rinsed and left out to dry on one of the benches, the rest piled into the scarred and pitted sink.

“It’s promising,” Ben said. “It never looks like this in the morning.”

“Shhh,” Thea said, straining forward to see.

They waited in silence, without moving, until they heard a sound, very faint, of glass clinking against glass. Thea hid a smile as she typed something else into the wrist pad, hiding the small screen’s glow
under her sleeve; in the next instant, she was standing beside the sink without ever having actually physically moved, and a smothered squawk from her closed hand betrayed the presence of an astonished and furious little man less than a foot tall. Ben and Magpie hurried over. At first, all they could see were two angrily waving arms below a peaked brown hat that seemed two sizes too large for its owner.

“Put me down! Put me down this instant! Put me
down
, you great human elephant! We had a deal! You weren’t even supposed to know I was here!”

“It’s hard not to know, when you do what you do,” Ben said, unable to help himself.

The Tersii’s hat turned around, revealing a small, pointed face with dark eyes and a broad, bulbous nose. The gnome stared at Ben, his lips pursed in an annoyed grimace of recognition.

“You,” he said peevishly. “I should’ve known. It was an inside job.”

“Hush,” Thea said. “I have another deal for you—you, or someone else of your kindred. I mean you no harm, and will not reveal your presence to anybody. Nor will anyone else here. Your secret is safe with us if you will lead us to those we need to speak to.”

“What do you want?” the Tersii said suspiciously,
squinting up at Thea.

“I need a changeling.”

The Tersii stared at her. “That will cost you.”

“That’s my problem. Mine, and whoever it is I bargain with. Do we have a deal with you?”

“Uh, sure. But I can’t get you a changeling. You’d need to go much further up the hierarchy for that. The Court, even.”

“How do I get there?”

“They don’t let just
anyone…
” the Tersii said, outraged.

“Yes, but it was the Faele themselves who labeled me a seeker in my cradle,” Thea said. “I’m not just anyone. How do I get there?”

“Let me get my boss,” the Tersii said, after a pause. “I can’t do any of this. I’m just clean-up crew. I earn my keep; I’m a working-class body, not like some mucky mucks up above me.”

“Like your boss?” Magpie said, unable to help herself.

The Tersii blinked. “Tricksy. I didn’t say that. Let me go, and I’ll get—”

Thea shook her head. “No. You can call him. I’ll let you go when he gets here. The boss.”

The Tersii, looking sulky, straightened his hat with
both hands. “Fine,” he said sullenly. “Oh,
fine
.”

He tilted his head and closed his eyes for a moment, and then opened them again. “Coming,” he said. “Can I get on with my work now? You sure nobody will know?”

“Oh everybody
knows
,” Ben said. “But nobody will have seen you. Cross my heart.”

Thea opened her hand and the little man stepped smartly out of her reach, straightening his clothes as he did so. “Caught like a nipper,” he muttered to himself. “As though I haven’t been doing this for a hundred and fifty years.”

“Do they really live that long?” Magpie said, astonished, turning to Thea.

“How do you know how long their year is?” Thea said, grinning.

A small, theatrical flash of white light announced the arrival of the Tersii worker’s boss. He stood just a smidge taller than his underling, and his hat was more gold than brown, but other than that, he didn’t look much different from the original Tersii, who had vanished somewhere into the pile of dirty glassware and by the sound of things was hard at work.

“Well, who wants me?” the boss Tersii asked
with some asperity.

“Lay off my father’s phosphorus,” Ben muttered. “I recognize that flash.”

“I come bargaining,” Thea said, ignoring the interruption. “I need a changeling.”

Boss Tersii stood up a little straighter. “A changeling,” he said. “You don’t say. And what might this changeling be for?”

“That’s for the one who can provide me one to know,” Thea said.

“Well,
I
can’t,” the little man said, throwing his arms wide. “Did that doofus over there tell you this was something I could accomplish? I’ll flay him….”

“No,” Thea said. “What he said, I believe, is that you can give us access to a higher level. To the Court.”

“The Court isn’t in session,” Boss Tersii said, crossing his arms.

“They will be,” Thea said. “For this. Get the message out.”

“You would summon the Court here? To this filthy place?”

“I’m working as fast as I can!” the original Tersii grumbled from the sink.

Thea shrugged. “Here, or wherever they choose.”

“A changeling. What would a human want with a changeling?”

“Not a human changeling. A pigeon changeling.”

Ben whipped his head around to stare at Thea, his mouth hanging open. He looked like he was about to say something, but Magpie touched his arm gently, giving him a light shake of her head.

Boss Tersii didn’t entirely miss all of that, but he was far too busy trying to make sense of Thea’s words to pay all that much attention.

“A
pigeon
changeling?” he echoed, not bothering to conceal his astonishment. “What possible use would there be in a Faele pigeon changeling?”

“Court,” Thea said sweetly. “Call them and find out.”

The Boss Tersii looked the three of them up and down. “Great galumphing humans,” he muttered. “You’d stomp on the Court with those clodhoppers and that would be the end of that. I will get the Queen’s Chancellor.”

“The Queen,” Thea said, gently but insistently. “Or else the Chancellor will just have to go and get
her himself. What I ask is not for the common official.”

“The Chancellor is a Royal Paladin, I will have you know,” Boss Tersii said.

“The Queen,” Thea said.

“Oh, fine,” Boss Tersii said. “On your own head be it. I can tell you now she is not used to being summoned by the likes of you. She will not be happy.” He winked out.

Ben shook off Magpie’s hand and turned to Thea. “Are you sure you know what you are doing?” he whispered.

Thea smiled and shook her head. “Nope,” she said. “I’m figuring things out as I go along. I’ve got the Feds behind me—for now—and Humphrey’s still backing me.”

“But
he
doesn’t know what you’re doing, either,” Ben said doggedly.

“He never did,” Thea said. “But even if all that fails, I have Tesla. I have me.”

“You might be putting too much in that basket. Even Elemental magic can’t take on two other polities at once.”

Further conversation was prevented by an odd distortion of the air above one of the benches. It
slowly resolved into a window that looked into what appeared to be a forest glade wreathed in amethyst twilight. Lanterns filled with fireflies hung from twigs and branches, most of them in an arch above a bower thick with rose petals on which reclined the tiny, delicate form of an exquisite silver-haired woman with a single white gem on her brow. She held what looked like a large jeweled hatpin as a scepter. Her arms were weighed down with silver bracelets from wrist to elbow, and she wore a fragile-looking silver gown that glittered with tiny crystals over an undergarment of a shimmering royal purple.