Spellwright

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

A low, grating screech jolted Nicodemus awake. Sweat had soaked through his robes. “Who’s there?” He struggled out of bed. His candle had burnt to a dark stub.

The screech came again along with the flapping of wings. A golden flash made him look at the window. “Azure!” he exclaimed, pulling out the paper screen.

The parrot flew into his chest. Squawking with surprise, man and bird tumbled onto the sleeping cot. “Shannon! Shannon!” Azure called in a terrified, pitiful voice. “Shannon!”

The familiar was standing on his stomach. Her tiny chest heaved; her head bobbed. A small scroll was bound to her leg by a Magnus sentence. “It’s all right,” Nicodemus cooed, pulling the scroll free.

Azure scrambled onto his shoulder, and he sat up to read the scroll. His brows knitted in confusion. “Azure, this makes no sense. There’s a key for the front door ward. Magister said he’d send that. But there’s ink all over the mundane text and these other Numinous paragraphs are gibberish.”

He translated the common language words above the gibberish: “Research ***” and “Dogfood.”

“Shannon!” the bird called and cast a Numinous sentence into Nicodemus’s head.

Shannon, having impressed his linguistic abilities into the bird, could have made perfect sense of this sentence. But Nicodemus’s translation yielded “My-old-home-ones ate Shannon!”

Nicodemus’s palms began to sweat. Azure had hatched in Trillinon. Those from her “old home” must be Northerners.

Nicodemus went to the window and peered down into the Stone Court. The sentinels who had been guarding its door were gone.

“Ate” to Azure meant consumed, enveloped. The Northern sentinels must have seized Shannon. “Demigods of the Celestial Canon defend us!” Nicodemus whispered.

Azure leaped from his shoulder and flapped into the night. No doubt she was going in search of where the sentinels were holding Shannon.

Nicodemus turned back to his room and shivered as he remembered his most recent nightmare. “Fly from Starhaven!” April had said. “Fly and don’t look back!”

He took a clean apprentice robe over to the fireplace’s clicking embers. With trembling fingers, he changed out of his sweat-soaked night robe and thought about the nightmare.

Like the others, this dream had made little sense. The cavern and the body, the episodes from his childhood, April’s warning-none of it seemed to fit together.

However, unlike the others, this nightmare provided a clear warning: “The white beast has your shadow!” April had said.

No doubt the “white beast” was the pale monster Nicodemus had seen attacking Eric. That monster must have been the murderer’s golem. Therefore, it would make sense if the shrouded body in the cavern was their enemy’s true, living body.

But that still left the question of the cavern’s location.

Nicodemus thought of the nightmare turtles he had seen in his first cavern nightmare. Then he thought about the hexagonal pattern carved at the end of the Spindle Bridge. The hidden body had to have something to do with the Spindle. But what? Shannon’s texts had found nothing but rock in the mountain.

And who might be sending him the dreams? Not the murderer: all evidence indicated the fiend did not know Nicodemus’s identity, and even if he did, the villain wouldn’t want to reveal any hint of his body’s location.

But then again, Shannon had said the nightmares came from special spells that ancient authors knew how to write. Who else besides the golem-wielding murderer had knowledge of ancient texts?

Perhaps there was a clue in the dream? April’s voice had spoken directly to him. No one had spoken to him in previous dreams.

The wound on Nicodemus’s cheek throbbed again as he remembered April’s warning: “The white beast will find you unless you fly from Starhaven!”

Normally such an indication of danger would have sent him running to Shannon, but now the old man was locked up.

Nicodemus noticed that the scroll Azure had brought had fallen to the floor. He picked it up. “Dogfood,” Shannon had written above each paragraph-and at the top: “Research ***.”

Had the old man not had time to tell him what to research? Had he meant to come back and edit the phrase? Perhaps Nicodemus was supposed to research three stars. Or something about Starhaven? But where could Nicodemus research anything?

He began to pace. He tried to breathe on his hands but accidentally brushed the Magnus stitches on his cheek. Pain lanced into his skull and brought with it a sudden memory of his nightmare: “Fly and don’t look back!” April had warned him. “Never look back!”

Nicodemus looked at the door. He should run, he thought, taking a step forward. But then he realized that even if he ran, the murderer would continue killing male cacographers. He turned back to the fire. He had to stay.

But he couldn’t ignore the dreams. He looked back at the door. Perhaps he should take the other male cacographers up to the compluvium? But if Shannon had wanted him to do that, he would have said so on the scroll.

Again Nicodemus raised his hands to breathe on them, and again he brushed the wound on his cheek.

“Fiery blasted blood!” he swore out loud, the pain igniting his frustration and anger. “I was supposed to be the Halcyon! I was supposed to be sure and decisive. And now I’m afraid to do anything!”

He sat before the fire and held his hands toward the coals.

He must have been cursed. He wasn’t supposed to be like this. The golem’s author must have stolen his strength and his ability to spell.

But if that were true, it would mean that he could restore his ability to spell. It would mean he could end his cacography.

Nicodemus focused all of his attention on the hope of completing himself. He fed it all of his fear and uncertainty. His desire grew and began to radiate heat. He wasn’t going to pace about like a dithering boy. The monster had stolen part of his mind. Hatred blazed within him. He would get the missing part of himself back!

He stood up and decided that he would take the male cacographers up to the compluvium; from there he could plan his next move. Perhaps he would seek to free Shannon. Perhaps he would find a way to strike back against the golem.

Again the most recent nightmare returned to him. “The white beast will find you unless you fly from Starhaven,” April had said. “Fly with anything you have!”

In a way, he was fleeing out of Starhaven proper to the compluvium. The dream must have predicted this. But what to take with him? He looked around at his cot, his robes, his books, his endless pages of spelling drills. What would help protect the boys or harm the golem? His eyes fell on Shannon’s open scroll and its radiant Numinous paragraphs.

Abruptly, he realized he couldn’t take the boys to the compluvium.

Not yet.

The meaning of Shannon’s words was suddenly clear. The old man was a linguist after all, and linguists studied all aspects of language… even metaphor.

Dogfood.

Leaving the drum Tower proved simple. Shannon’s key disspelled the ward on the door and, of course, there were no guards in the Stone Court.

Nicodemus worried about being stopped in the hallways. But as he hurried through the stronghold, he found it mostly empty. Occasionally he spotted teams of wizards rushing through a hallway as if on an urgent errand. Oddly, they were usually led by librarians.

At the Main Library’s entrance, Nicodemus reached into Shannon’s scroll and pulled out the passwords. Careful not to hold the text too long, he tossed the paragraph to a guardian spell.

The construct snapped it out of the air and glared at Nicodemus. The canine spell would tear his arms off if it discovered a misspelled rune sequence. A long moment passed as it chewed the words. Nicodemus was about to turn and run when the spell stretched into a dog bow.

Filled with dread, Nicodemus stole into the library. Without sunlight streaming through the windows, the place was dark. Rows of tapers produced dim globes of shifting light that stretched up to the ceiling like an ascending column of stars.

Nicodemus found the place unnervingly empty. He had expected at least a dozen wizards to be working by candlelight. But instead he saw only a handful of librarians rushing off to unknown tasks.

Finding the Index’s chamber was easy enough. And the guardian standing watch before the chamber let him pass when he fed her Shannon’s second paragraph.

As he approached the Index, his hands began to shake. Back in his room he had been so sure-use the Index to discover Shannon’s message, then sneak it away to the compluvium where he could use it to research spells that might harm the golem.

But now Nicodemus noticed faint Numinous sentences running through the chamber’s door frame that he hadn’t seen before. They could only be the sentences of an alarm spell. Removing the Index would trip that spell and summon swarms of sentinels.

He could not steal the Index, but he could still discover why Shannon had sent him there.

With nervous steps, he crept into the chamber and stared at the Index’s blank cover. From outside came the grinding vibration of the guardian shifting her Magnus ball. After cradling the book in his arm, Nicodemus undid the clasp.

Magister Smallwood had said that the Index could search the text of any codex within Starhaven’s walls. And Magister Shannon’s personal research journal had three asterisks embossed on its spine and face, thereby making “***” its title.

Nicodemus opened the Index with the intention of discovering what Shannon had written for him in his research journal.

Warmth bloomed across his cheeks as his body synaesthetically reacted to the Index’s magic. He had expected some synaesthesia, but the strength of this reaction was unsettling. Had something gone wrong? He tried to shift his weight.

But he couldn’t. His muscles would not respond. Panic thrilled up his body as he remembered the nightmare of only hours ago. Was he still dreaming?

The synaesthetic heat in his cheeks burned scalding hot even as a more disturbing warmth flushed across his stomach and groin. He knew that this-his second synaesthetic reaction-indicated the presence of a dangerously powerful foreign spell. His fear became panic.

Without warning, violet ribbons of light erupted from the Index and wriggled into his hands. A surge of nausea turned his stomach and he convulsed in a dry heave.

The Index blazed brighter, and Nicodemus could only watch, paralyzed as an incandescent cylinder emerged from the page. His legs buckled and he fell to his knees. The spell lunged into his throat.

The room blurred and a strange roaring sound throbbed in his ears. Blood flowed down his nose and filled his mouth. Involuntarily, he turned and vomited.

Without his willing them to, Nicodemus’s arms placed the Index back on its marble podium.

The instant the book’s spine touched cool stone, its control over him vanished and he collapsed into darkness.

When Nicodemus opened his eyes, a dull pain was striking the opposite ends of his skull the way a clapper rings the inside of a bell. The world was spinning, and the sour taste of vomit curdled in his mouth.

But he felt like laughing.

The bold arches and thick lines of a new alphabet burned before his eyes with a soft and otherworldly beauty. Like Numinous, this powerful violet language affected light and other text.

After wiping his mouth, Nicodemus staggered to his feet and discovered a myriad of purple sentences floating in slow concentric circles around the Index. More astonishing, a miniature river of the text flowed from the book into his chest and then back.

Slowly he realized what this meant: the Index was a tome, a magical artifact capable of teaching its reader a new language. But it had done so in a shocking and mysterious way.

When Nicodemus was sixteen he had used the Numinous and Magnus tomes to learn the wizardly languages. That had been a slow process, involving days of memorizing runes, vocabulary, and grammar. His ability to see the wizardly languages had developed at a tedious pace. It had been anything but exciting or traumatic.

The Index, on the other hand, had quite literally jammed a new language down his throat.

When he wondered how this was possible, the runes emerging from his chest swelled in number and flowed into the Index. In response, the book flipped a few leaves to present a page worked in black ink. Nicodemus stepped closer to read:

From A Treatis on Lost Spells amp; Langeuges, by Geoffrey Lea

The spell of etching is widely regarded as the most mysterious of the lost godspells. Little is known about this ancent text except that it was written by the primortial sun god Sol. Aparently, a diety would use etching to bind a conscious being, not necessarily a human, as an avatar. There is allso mention of the spell’s ability to “impress” a langeuge upon its target through direct mental contact. The Neosolar pantheon regarded etching as tabboo. The great goddess Solmay forbid any diety who pratciced this spell to travel across the ocean to our land. We can only assume that, at the time of the Exodus, the spell of soulsplitting was already available as an alternative method for binding avatars.

Because soulsplitting is the only godspell known to requre the consentual participation of its target, many speculate that etching could be cast upon an unwilling subject. However…

Nicodemus’s mouth worked silently. Somehow, he had conducted a search for mundane text without touching the Index. He inspected the page again.

The words implied that the book had used a godspell to teach him this new language. But that was impossible; only a living being could write magic, and only a deity could cast a godspell.

Nicodemus reread the passage to make sure he had not misunderstood. The text was the same, but this time something about the words bothered him. He read again.

There was something strange about the words “ancent,” “langeuge,” and “conscious.” He studied each one, trying to decide what it was that caught his eye.

A horrible idea filled his mind.

“No!” he whispered, a wild fear tearing loose in his gut. “No! I didn’t!” He staggered closer so that there could be no mistake. “Gods of grace, no!”

But there it was.

Los himself could not have inspired a more excruciating fear than that which now possessed him. He knew there should be an “i” somewhere in the word “ancent.” And “langeuge” should end in “-age.” As for “conscious,” only a fool would fail to put a “huss” after the “s”-conshuss. Or maybe it was “cawnshuss,” but definitely not “conscious”-that was absurd.

There was only one explanation: contact with his cacographic mind had filled the Index with misspellings.

It didn’t matter, Nicodemus told himself, pressing a hand to his chest. He had intended to steal the artifact anyway.

But the fear building in his mind would not be ignored. Stealing an artifact was a serious crime, and wizards despised nothing more than the destruction of a magical artifact. If they discovered him now, they would permanently censor magical literacy from his mind. Worse, their hatred for him and for all cacographers would multiply a hundredfold. He would become the most infamous misspeller since James Berr had killed those wizards so long ago.

“Calm yourself,” Nicodemus said slowly. Perhaps only this document was misspelled. It was written nearly four hundred years ago. Maybe the spellings were different then.

Intending to find Magister Shannon’s most recent treatise on spell intelligence, Nicodemus reached out and turned a page. With deep trepidation, he read:

From Concatenation’s Effects on Secondary Cognition in Semi-Atonomous Nonsense amp; Antisense Numinous Disspells, by Agwu Shannon.

Resent spell inteligence research has focused on the nessesity of imbuing an aspect of the caster’s consciousness…

As he read the last word, Nicodemus groaned and shut his eyes. How could this be? Maybe, he thought, maybe the magical texts hadn’t been affected. Maybe contact with his mind had only misspelled the mundane texts.

Nicodemus pressed his palm to the page and thought of a spell called “touch.” He chose touch because it possessed such a simple, straightforward rune sequence that he would be able to tell if the version contained within the Index was misspelled.

Just as a fisherman’s hook yanks an unsuspecting trout from the river, the Index plucked Nicodemus’s mind from the wetness within his skull and sent it sailing into a vast and airy space.

It took a moment for him to perceive his new surroundings. Here Nicodemus had no eyes, no body. There was no up, no down. Everything was darkness.

Nicodemus’s surprise turned to fear. The blackness became heavy and thick, like humid air. He struggled to free himself but could not. He wanted to scream but had no lungs; he wanted to run but had no legs.

At last he forced himself to relax. Slowly, his mind opened to the strange new world. Tiny glimmers moved all around him. They grew brighter and became glowing gems that hung as if suspended from invisible tree limbs.

His vision became sharper and suddenly it was as if he were floating in the night sky. The luminescent orbs had become stars of different shapes and colors. Some blazed with fierce emerald radiation; others glowed indigo or ivory so dimly that they disappeared when he looked directly at them.

At last he realized that this black firmament was the world within the Index. Now he became aware of his body, swaying somewhere far below on the floor. The realization brought on a wave of vertigo and twisted his face into a grimace.

Back inside the Index, stars of silver and gold appeared. Nicodemus’s perception of the book’s night sky was rapidly improving; within moments he could see for untold miles. The starry array stretched endlessly away.

Suddenly he realized what he was looking at. These were not stars, but spells. His vision confirmed it. He was staring through the Index at every text contained within Starhaven.

He must be thinking through the spells attached to the Index; he was having quaternary thoughts. It was a glorious, dreamlike feeling. But his elation faded as he remembered why he had entered the Index in the first place.

He needed to find the touch spell.

A white star flashed brighter and began to speed toward him like a comet. An instant later, the spell crashed into him with a soundless explosion.

Removing his hand from the Index made Nicodemus’s mind drop like a lightning bolt back into his head. He blinked. Returning to the bony confines of his skull was intensely uncomfortable. He shook his head and felt his ideas slosh around like seaweed.

“Oh… yuck!” he said.

Gradually his mind molded itself to his skull. And he found that he could think clearly again.

A new knowledge of the simple touch spell was now inside of him. The spell’s primary sequence burned before his eyes as clearly as if he had just written it out a thousand times. But some of the runes were out of order-he knew because touch was one of the few spells simple enough that he had memorized its proper spelling.

Now he was sure: contact with his mind had misspelled one of the Order’s most prized artifacts.

Nicodemus put his hands to his face. “No… no…” he whimpered. Shame and guilt throbbed behind his eyes. He would forever be known as the cacographer who had destroyed Starhaven’s most valuable artifact.

“Wait!” he sputtered. “Wait.” There was one last hope. Perhaps if he could repair his disabled mind, he could repair the Index. “Show me,” he ordered the Index, “any mundane documents relating to curing cacography.”

As the book began flipping pages, Nicodemus looked up and muttered a prayer to Hakeem. When the Index stopped, he took a deep breath and looked down, ready to read.

But the page was blank.

Breath spilled out of Nicodemus. His cacography had destroyed the Index. Maybe he’d vomit again.

“I had better be the Halcyon,” he mumbled to himself while pressing a hand to his belly. If he wasn’t, he’d never forgive himself for destroying such a beautiful artifact.

His hands began to tremble.

“Los damn it!” he growled. “I will not be like this.” He closed his eyes. “I won’t be weak. I won’t be crippled.”

He had to regain his determination to defeat the golem and erase his cacography. He could do it, if he was bold enough, disciplined enough. There was no time for fear or guilt.

He glared at the Index and cleared his mind of everything but the three asterisks of Shannon’s research journal. Then he placed his palm on the blank page before him.

His mind shot upward like an arrow into another plane. But rather than a starry night sky, he floated before a massive golden wall that stretched out almost endlessly in either direction. The wall itself was made of Shannon’s Numinous prose.

Nicodemus found himself staring at the journal’s first page, dated more than twenty years ago.

Simply by thinking of a later entry, Nicodemus sent the wall sliding to his left. Looking at the wall’s distant end, he saw that the text bent back to form a massive circle.

The codex-as-ring spun past in a golden blur. Then, without warning, it slammed to a dizzying, soundless stop.

Shannon’s last entry glowed before him. It was a long Numinous spell annotated by common language sentences that glowed green.

Nicodemus frowned, trying to glean the text’s purpose. The prose seemed to be that of a disspell, but it was not of the typical nonsense or antisense varieties. Its structure was that of a clamp.

That made no sense. Normally disspells sought to pull apart another spell’s argument. This disspell looked as if it would try to hold the other text together.

Nicodemus turned to the annotations. As he read, a smile spread across his face. “Magister,” he whispered. “It’s brilliant!”

It was not a disspell at all, but an attack spell adapted to hold magical prose inside of a golem. If Nicodemus cast this text on the golem, its spirit would be trapped. The author would be vulnerable.

Abruptly Shannon’s spell rushed forward to crash into Nicodemus’s mind. The rush of golden prose dazzled his eyes and then faded away to reveal the physical world.

Once again Nicodemus stood swaying before the Index.

A vivid knowledge of the anti-golem spell now burned in his brain. Shannon wanted him to have this when he took the boys up to the compluvium, Nicodemus realized. With this spell he could endanger the golem’s author without having to find its true body.

A shiver rushed up Nicodemus’s back. He needed to return to the Drum Tower.

The Index lay before him. Closing the book made the halo of purple sentences collapse back into its pages. After a long breath, he turned away and started for the door.

“Don’t you want the book?” a quick, squeaking voice said.

Nicodemus jumped back. “Who’s there?” He began to write a club of simple Magnus sentences in his biceps.

From the corner stepped a lanky gargoyle with a snow monkey’s body, a bat’s giant ears, and an owl’s bulging eyes. Nicodemus recognized the construct he had misspelled in the Stacks. “Gargoyle, did I meet you last night?”

“Petra,” she said, nodding vigorously. “Now I’m named Petra.” She grinned at him before scampering to the doorway. “Take the book. You misspelled it like me.”

“But the alarm spell will-”

“Alarm spell nothing.” The gargoyle peeled a chord of faint Numinous sentences from one side of the doorway. “Get the book and step under this.” She pulled the alarm spell free of the floor and held it up above her head.

Nicodemus stared at her for a moment, then fetched the Index. “But not even a grand wizard could move those sentences,” he said while ducking under the alarm.

She nodded and spoke rapidly. “Since you rewrote me, I can do things other constructs can’t. I can trade and bargain. I got these eyes from a night-watch gargoyle, the ears from a grunt who hunts mice. But I think I still only have secondary thoughts.” She looked up at him with childish curiosity. “What’s the difference between secondary and tertiary cognition?”

He grimaced. “Secondary constructs can’t remember anything about mortality. The academy claims they’re not fully sentient, so it’s not immoral to deconstruct them.”

The gargoyle started. One of her batlike ears flicked away and then back. “Mortality?”

Nicodemus nodded. “As in death. Secondary constructs can’t remember what it means to die.”

“But I think I still only have secondary thoughts. What is the difference between secondary and tertiary cognition?” Her tone was the same tone as before.

Nicodemus hugged the Index to his chest. “I’m sorry, Petra. I don’t know how to tell you.”

The gargoyle didn’t seem to be listening; her ears were flicking about in different directions. “You should go!” she whispered. “I see and hear many things now. There are corrupt gargoyles now. We constructs are all talking about them. No one knows who’s written them. They’re spying on the wizards.”

Nicodemus swallowed. “What about the gargoyles in the compluvium?”

“They’re uncorrupted,” she said. “You should leave this place now. Something bad is near.”

“Thank you, Petra,” he said and turned away.

She laughed and called after him, “Thank you, Nicodemus Weal. You are my author who made me my own author.”

Unsure of what to say, Nicodemus hurried away though the library’s cavernous center. A thousand thoughts raced through his mind. But when he stepped through the main entrance into the Women’s Atrium a realization made him stop.

“Los damn it!” he swore. Because the Index was misspelled, so might be his understanding of Shannon’s text. There was no telling if he could produce a functional respell. Fear tightened his throat. Writing this attack spell might even be dangerous.

He started to curse his cacography but then thought of Petra the gargoyle. It took him a moment to identify the warm feeling in his chest as pride-he hadn’t felt that for a long time.

He drew in a deep breath and looked up at the atrium’s ceiling. The mosaic of Uriel Bolide looked back at him. With her left hand, Bolide was pointing a red wand at a scroll she held in her right. Chips of amber had been used to depict her celebrated long hair.

Her smile was amused, as if she had just discovered the properties of magical advantage by applying a little femininity to a problem that had confounded the then all-male wizards.

Nicodemus was struck by how strongly the woman in the mosaic resembled April. In the nightmare, April’s image had stretched above him and her hair had become trains of stars. “Fly from Starhaven!” she had said. “Fly with anything you have!”

Again Nicodemus hugged the Index to his chest. It was all he had.

His steps quickened until he was sprinting across the Stone Court. In a few hours someone would notice the missing Index. Before that happened, he had to hide all of the male cacographers in the compluvium.