Spellwright

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Raindrops cut icy flecks of life into Deirdre’s wind-numbed face. Billowing clouds blanketed the sky save for a few rents that poured city-sized sunbeams onto the Highlands.

Deirdre was laughing as she galloped down the Highridge Road. To either side, the mountains dropped into deep valleys. Some dells were crisscrossed with stone walls and speckled with Highland sheep. Ravens there were too, clouds of them flapping through the dark sky or filling the few trees like a harvest of noisy, black-feathered fruit.

Topping the next ridge, Deirdre looked down the road to the watchtowers guarding the entrance to Glengorm: one of her clan’s fortified homesteads.

As she galloped, sunlight swept across the road and glinted on her armor. The guards cheered as she tore through the open gates.

Down into the glen she flew, barely noticing the fortified houses or the wooden barricades meant to keep livestock in and lycanthropes out. At the bottom of the glen lay a narrow lake. A small stone fort stood on a jetty that extended into the gray water.

Deirdre did not rein in her mare until she was in the fort’s stable yard. Her clansmen in the stalls shouted joyously. Others appeared at the windows.

Deirdre swung down and threw her reins to the nearest boy. “Treat her well,” she said through a wry smile. “She’s had a bit of a run.”

The men within earshot laughed at her understatement.

She raised a fist and yelled, “The White Fox has escaped to Dral! Confusion to the Lornish Crown!” The men echoed her cry at near deafening volume.

She led another cheer and then hurried into the fort and up three flights of narrow wooden stairs. When she pushed the door open, Kyran was pacing by the window.

His limp was less pronounced now, but still he favored his left leg, probably would for the rest of his life. His long hair hung across his shoulders in a golden curtain.

Her wry smile renewed itself. “Only half a year ago Paladin Garwyn nearly cut that limb off.” She nodded to his bandaged right leg. “Perhaps you shouldn’t be troubling it so.”

Kyran turned around, his brown eyes alight with expectation. “Great Soul,” he said, sinking to his left knee.

She closed the door and went to him. His freshly shaven face turned up toward her. The scar below his ear was little more than a red line now. “My cousin?” he asked. “Did he make it safely to Dral?”

Deirdre suppressed a laugh. “Always so serious, Kyran. The White Fox runs in feral woods tonight. A fist of rangers met us at the river. If they can avoid the lycanthropes, they shall reach Kerreac in less than a fortnight.”

Relief drew Kyran’s thin lips into a dimpled smile. He took her hand and bent over it. “I swear on Bridget’s name that you have my undying love.”

His touch made Deirdre’s head feel as light as smoke.

There was nothing to indicate it, but she knew that he had meant “you” to be plural, to include her goddess. Her hands trembled as she turned his chin up. “And you shall have ours.”

He stood and pressed his lips to hers. Her heart throbbed to an irregular rhythm. She felt as if she were having an aura.

She had thought of this for so long, known how forbidden it was. “From the first,” he whispered, “I loved you always.”

Laughing, she pulled him closer and stopped his words with her tongue.

She could tell by his kiss that this time he had meant the word “you” to be singular; his love was for her only.

His arms closed around her.

“Do you love me still?” she murmured into his neck. “Love me only?”

“Yes.” His voice the briefest susurration by her ear. “I loved you always; I love you still.”

Her face tingled with warmth as she pulled back far enough to kiss him again.

Slowly the world tilted so that they lay facing each other. The room dimmed. Her hands trembled badly. His face lost its bristles and became as smooth as a boy’s. His long golden hair, flowing all about them, darkened until it was as black as her own. Her hands clenched as an ecstatic warmth flushed down her back. Silently, she prayed she would not fall into a seizure now.

Her lover’s eyes lightened from dark brown to deep green. They were not Kyran’s eyes.

She was not falling into a seizure but waking from one.

Kyran was dead.

With a shriek, she threw out her arms and turned away from Nicodemus.

Deirdre’s shove tossed Nicodemus into the air.

Arms flailing, he turned a half-flip and landed on his back. All the air rushed from his lungs.

He tried to inhale but couldn’t. Suddenly Deirdre, her druid robes streaked with dirt, was kneeling over him and apologizing.

Long airless moments passed, each one an agonizing eternity. Deirdre took his tattooed hands. “Are you hurt? Why did you do that?”

At last Nicodemus’s lungs expanded. “I didn’t do anything!” he panted. “You were the one who-”

He stopped.

Only the faint light of dusk came down the cellar stairs, but it was enough to illuminate her tears.

“What did I do?” she asked in a shaky voice. “It was a seizure, Nicodemus; my goddess took control of me. I don’t remember a thing.”

Nicodemus’s throat tightened. He glanced over and saw that John had slept through their exchange so far. Nervously, he turned back to Deirdre. “You… you and I were talking about what we should do next. You argued that we need to run to Gray’s Crossing and find Boann’s ark. I thought it was too dangerous. By now the sentinels will be looking for me.”

Deirdre shook her head. “The ark sits in an inn at the town’s edge. It won’t be difficult to reach undetected.”

Nicodemus sat up. His head throbbed where it had struck ground. “Deirdre, I’ve stolen the Index. Every wizard south of Astrophell must be editing their attack spells and forming witch hunts to find me. Listen, Shannon gave me more than enough gold to see us to Dar or the City of Rain. You must have allies in the Highlands who can help us.”

Deirdre was shaking her head. “Nicodemus, it doesn’t matter where you run; without divine protection Fellwroth will find you.”

Nicodemus winced as his hand brushed his cheek. Shannon’s Magnus stitches were holding, but the wound was still tender. “This is where the argument stopped before. But you began to speak of your goddess’s beauty and then…” He looked away. “And you told me…”

“Nicodemus,” she whispered, squeezing his hand, “whatever flattery came from my mouth, it was Boann’s. She knows how important you are; she wants to protect you.”

Nicodemus looked her in the eye. “So she uses your body to manipulate me? That hardly sounds like a… Deirdre, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

She dried her eyes. “Nicodemus, don’t oppose her will. My desires are not my own. She’ll control me again. She’ll make me overpower you and drag you to her ark.”

Nicodemus let go of the woman’s hand. “Don’t threaten me, Deirdre. I am no wizard, but I am a spellwright.”

She retook his hand. “Nicodemus, you might cut me to pieces with your words, but Boann-”

“Let go of me.” He tried to pry off her fingers.

Her other hand clamped around his tattooed wrist. “Don’t do this; you will lose.”

Nicodemus extemporized a common language constricting spell along his tongue and spat the sentences around her elbows.

Surprised, Deirdre weakened her grip just enough for Nicodemus to slip his right hand free. He threw his arm back and wrote along it a short Magnus club. The text most likely was misspelled and would break after a single stroke, but he could deliver at least one blow.

Meanwhile, Deirdre heaved with her great strength and snapped the sentences wrapped around her elbow.

“Deirdre, stop, I’ve a spell in my-” He fell silent.

She now held the greatsword in her right hand. They locked eyes.

“Please,” she whispered, her eyes full of fear, “I cannot yield.”

“Then you will have to-” He stopped as a wall of faint golden light washed through the cellar. He jumped.

“What is it?”

A second wall of light flew through the cellar. Nicodemus dropped his Magnus club and caught one of the tiny Numinous words that made up the strange light.

Realization came with a surge of excitement. “It’s a broadly cast spell!” He began to translate the golden text. “It’s like a magical beacon.”

Deirdre lowered the greatsword. “But who would send a beacon to us?”

Nicodemus struggled to his feet. “We have to go. Let go of me.” When she did, he ran to pick up the Index.

“What happened?”

He grabbed her forearm as if to pull her along. “I’ll explain as we go. Now hurry!”

As they ran up the stairs, Nicodemus looked down at the translated word that glowed faintly gold on his palm. It read “nsohnannanhosn.”

Deirdre frowned. again Shannon doubled over and vomited nothing. Again Nicodemus went to his side and held the old man’s dreadlocks back from his face. The Index lay beside them. Azure, perched on a nearby rock pile, bobbed her head nervously.

Deirdre was sitting with Simple John in front of their campfire. Around them stretched the nighttime Chthonic ruins. The horse that Shannon had been riding was grazing somewhere out in the dark.

Above them, the forest’s branches tossed in the cold autumn wind; they made a soft rushing sound that was in sharp contrast to Shannon’s violent retching.

“What’s happening?” she whispered to Simple John.

The big man’s face paled. “Magister’s throwing up bywords. Bad words. Too many small, repeated words.”

They had found Shannon in the forest not an hour ago; he had seemed healthy then. In fact, the old linguist had launched into a story about his escape from the sentinels. He kept urging Nicodemus to turn and flee from Starhaven and travel to another wizardly academy called Starfall Keep.

Apparently, the Starhaven wizards thought Nicodemus was the Storm Petrel destroyer. Shannon thought he could convince the Starfall wizards otherwise. Nicodemus, overjoyed to recover his teacher, had agreed.

As they trekked back to the Chthonic ruins, the boy had told Shannon of everything that had happened since they were separated. Deirdre had argued that before setting out for Starfall, they should first go to Gray’s Crossing to seek her goddess’s protection.

Her thinking was simple: Nicodemus’s keloid would allow Fellwroth to track them. As a result, they would never reach Starfall Keep alive unless they removed the curse from Nicodemus’s scar. Deirdre had no doubt that Boann could do exactly that. Therefore, they had to go to Gray’s Crossing. However, despite the logic of this reasoning, neither man had heeded her advice.

But now things had changed.

After returning to the Chthonic ruins, they had found Simple John roasting skinned rabbits over a fire. The moment Shannon had touched food to his lips, he had keeled over to vomit out nothing-just as he was doing now.

Deirdre turned to John. “How is it that you can talk now when before you only knew three phrases?”

The big man looked down at his hands. “It was Typhon’s curse. The demon tied sentences around parts of my mind that use language, restricted them to the three phrases.”

“Forgive me, I didn’t-” Her apology was cut short by Shannon’s renewed retching. “Nicodemus,” she asked, grateful for the excuse to change subjects, “what’s wrong with Shannon?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” the grand wizard panted while sitting up. “It’s only a consequence of having a censoring spell peeled off my head too quickly.”

“No,” Nicodemus said without taking his eyes from the old man. “It’s the nonsensical words coming out of his mouth that’s the problem.”

The old wizard narrowed his blind eyes. His tone became ironic. “So witty with your double meaning.”

Deirdre coughed. “I don’t understand.”

“His story doesn’t make sense,” Nicodemus answered with irritation. “No censoring spell placed on his head could make his stomach fill with Magnus bywords.”

Shannon closed his eyes. Deirdre could see how frail he was. The old man sighed. “I shouldn’t have come. I agonized over it for hours, backtracked again and again to make sure the monster wasn’t following me. I hoped the monster had lied about Language Prime and the infecting curse. It wasn’t a lie.”

The old man shook his head. “In the end, I sought you out, Nicodemus, because I feared you might try to rescue me. I only wanted to send you away from that creature; I never guessed the logorrhea would set in so quickly.”

Nicodemus touched the wizard’s shoulder. “Tell me what happened,” he said firmly. “I deserve the truth.”

The old man reached out with his knobby hand. Nicodemus took it with his own. “Nicodemus, it seems as if you’ve aged fifty years since last evening.”

“Magister,” John said, “we all have.”

“Perhaps you’re right, John,” Shannon said. “Very well, Nicodemus, I will tell you. But promise to run with me to Starfall Keep. We cannot go back. We cannot submit to that monster.”

When Nicodemus agreed, Shannon explained how Fellwroth-not in a golem, but in a living body-had pulled him from his cell, and how the monster had used the Emerald of Arahest to infect him with a Language Prime curse called logorrhea, which made him vomit words.

“Magister!” Nicodemus said when the wizard finished. “You made me promise something I didn’t understand. No, we will not run to Starfall. That would take until spring; you’d die before we got there.”

The old man sat up straighter. “Perhaps Fellwroth was lying when he told you that all human prophecies are false. It is still possible that you are the Halcyon; that possibility forbids you from forfeiting your life for mine. Besides, we dare not trust Fellwroth. If we submit, the monster is likely to kill me anyway.”

Nicodemus shook his head. “I won’t watch you die.”

“Selfishness,” the wizard huffed. “Surrender and you empower the demons. Your duty is to confound the Disjunction. And if that means watching me contend with the canker growing in my stomach you-”

An idea bloomed in Deirdre’s mind. “This magical canker, is it like the mundane cankers that clerics remove from elderly bodies?”

All faces turned toward her. Shannon spoke. “Clerics are spellwrights that study medicine. We wizards wouldn’t know.”

A giddy warmth spread across Deirdre’s face. “Boann found a canker once on my back. She said they happen often to avatars because we live so long. She said deities routinely cut such growths off their avatars.”

Shannon scowled. “But what ails me is not one growth. I can see the runes coming from the cursed muscles around my stomach. The canker is laced all around the organ. Boann could cut my guts into bloody rags and there’d still be more curse to cut out.”

Deirdre was shaking her head. “But she is a goddess! You can’t-”

Nicodemus interrupted. “Are you sure Boann would heal Magister?”

“If you accept her protection, she would do anything.”

Shannon objected. “She can’t help me, Nicodemus. Look at the runes appearing in my gut; you can see how diffuse the canker is. Gray’s Crossing is far too dangerous; we can’t risk the life of a possible Halcyon for that of an old man.”

“We can, Magister, and if it comes to that we will.” Nicodemus stood up. “First, I need to research something here in these ruins. I might yet learn something about Language Prime. But if I can’t find a way to remove your curse, we will go to Gray’s Crossing.”

The old man scowled again. “Don’t be foolish. You have no right to risk yourself for me.”

“Magister, I do,” Nicodemus retorted. “I’m a cacographer, not a child.” He turned toward the ruins.

“Los damn it,” Shannon grumbled, and struggled to his feet. “Nicodemus, where are you going?”

The boy didn’t look back. “Into the Bestiary.”