Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 50

'Tell her that I think my Rhizome is mutating.'

That was all it took, this time, to be granted an audience with the Queen of Spiders.

Queen Sadie Weaver has deigned to take my call, although she's not impressed enough yet to stop working.

So, I'm climbing up bookshelves in the great library of the Secret School, where somewhere high up above, she is doing what she always does; she is reading. She is gathering information to weave into her endless cloth, towards ends she will never explain.

So much for instant messaging. I'd swear the Gap was designed to make communication more difficult, the antithesis of the original Internet.

As I approach, I see spider webs, and I can't get the Arachne thing out of my head. Sadie, thank God, does not have the body of a spider, but she is at the centre of all this cobweb. Here, suspended in the eaves of a tower lined with bookshelves so tall you cannot see all the way to the bottom of them.

I can see the tiny pulses of light that travel along each gossamer strand, encoded information flowing in and out and, to every corner of the Gap and beyond into the old web and into all the places of the world where the digital metaverse interfaces with the analogue universe.

But there is where it all stops. The digital world has limits. Or it used to. Before I showed up.

The line between soft information and hard reality, this is the limitation which my Rhizome appears to be breaking down, the place where the digital space starts to finally merge with the meat, with the chemistry and the atoms and the forces beyond the limits of the microprocessor, no matter if it's binary or quantum.

But I'm angry now, at how she can always just carry on with her work, when so many witches that trusted her are suffering.

"So, you found your mother."

And I reach out and snap one of the threads, vindictively like a sadistic school boy. She winces.

"Yeah, I saw her. Yeah, you were right. Yeah, I wish I hadn't, really wish..." and I choke on it, choke down another sob. Such a mess.

And she looks at me somehow both sympathetic and calculating.

And she says, "I loved her. As much as you did. And when we worked together, it was...it was breath-taking."

"So, why couldn't you just tell me? Why do you hide everything from me? Why should I trust you? I nearly died."

"You did die Ursula."

I can't think. It's too big.

"This is a new version of you I see before me. You've stopped looking for her now, haven't you? You've realised something new."

"Yeah, yes, I have. I'm not going anywhere. There is no New York for me anymore. I'm going to destroy Marketta; I'm going to do whatever it takes to hit back at the hunt. I'm yours to command now. But give me this. Help me get the twins off that ship. I know you can. You have agents on the ship. People who can get to my sisters."

"Oh, have I?" She smiles but not with her eyes. And she files away the information I have implied.

"I'll tell you why you will not attack that ship, Ursula. Because you do not know what Marketta is. She's waiting for you. She's just waiting for you to lose control. She's not a witch hating bigot. She is a witch. One of the greatest there ever was. She was the third woman in our coven."

"No, that can't be true. Marketta works for Silicon Valley."

"No. Marketta works for herself. Someone or something has been lying to you. I can prove everything I say. We were a coven. Marketta, Amanda and me. We were a coven, Ursula. We were the greatest that the world has ever known. And we invented the gods."