Under the bed sat a stack of mundane books. Among them was a knightly romance he had bought from a Lornish peddler. The fellow had promised that this particular romance, The Silver Shield, was the best one yet.
Nicodemus’s love for knightly romances sometimes followed him into his sleep. Since he had arrived in Starhaven, Nicodemus had spent countless hours imagining night terrors to populate the nearby forest. In both his dreams at night and daydreams, he would venture out to vanquish the imagined monsters.
He smiled now, thinking of the strange antagonists his young mind had imagined. Uro was a giant insect with a spiked carapace and scythelike hands. Tamelkan, the sightless dragon, possessed tentacles that grew from his chin. And of course there was Garkex, the firetroll, who spouted flame from his three horns and fiery curses from his mouth.
Dreaming of monsters and battles was a childish pleasure, Nicodemus knew, but it was one of the few he had known.
Looking at the book again, he sighed. His eyes were too weary to read.
He flopped onto his cot and began to untie his robe at the back of his neck. His hair could use brushing.
He was looking around for his comb when the sound of flapping wings came to his window. He turned to regard a large bird with vivid blue plumage. Bright yellow skin shone around her black eyes and hooked beak. “Corn,” croaked the bird in her scratchy parrot voice.
“Hello, Azure. I don’t keep corn in my room. Did Magister Shannon give you a message for me?”
The bird cocked her head to one side. “Scratch.”
“All right, but the message?”
The bird hopped onto the cot and waddled over to Nicodemus. Using her beak to grab onto his robes, the familiar pulled herself onto his lap and presented the top of her head to be scratched; Nicodemus obliged.
“Azure, the message from Magister is important.”
The bird whistled two notes before casting a barrage of golden sentences from her head to Nicodemus’s.
Languages like Numinous, which could manipulate light and other text, were often used to encode written messages. The spell that Azure had just cast was one such.
The problem was that Numinous had a complex structure, and so a cacographer’s touch misspelled all but the simplest Numinous sentences. That is why Nicodemus had to work quickly to translate Shannon’s message.The longer he held the text in his mind, the faster his disability would distort its spelling.
Numinous runes possessed fluid shapes resembling tendrils of smoke or threads of spun glass. Translating them made a spellwright’s fingers feel as if they were touching smooth glass. As he worked, Nicodemus’s fingers twitched with phantom sensation.
Shannon’s message was complicated, and when Nicodemus finished translating, it was garbled:
Nicodemus—
Do n’t discuss tonight’s conversaton w/ anyone, incldng roomates. V. important to atract littel attn. As planed, come to my study direclty after brecfast. You are excused from aprentice duty four the day.
—Mg. Shannon
Azure presented the back of her head again. “Scratch?”
Nicodemus absently stroked the bird’s feathers. Shannon’s instruction to avoid attention was worrisome. Nicodemus did not know what was prompting the old man’s vigilance, but he had no doubt that it was serious.
“Sweet heaven, the druids,” Nicodemus whispered, remembering how his attempt to impress Deirdre had elicited a barrage of questions about prophecy and his disability. “Magister is going to kill me.”
“Scratch?” Azure repeated.
Nicodemus looked down and realized that in his distraction he had stopped petting the familiar. “I’m sorry, Azure. I’m exhausted.” It was true—his eyes stung, his bones ached, his thoughts seemed slow as pine sap. “I’d better sleep if I’m going to help Magister tomorrow.”
“Scratch?”
“Maybe tomorrow.”
Finally convinced that she was not going to be petted, Azure hopped over to the window. She made her two-note whistle and flapped away into the night.
Blinking his weary eyes, Nicodemus went to the washstand and, rubbing his hands together, forged the small white runes wizards used for soap. Looking into his polished-metal mirror, he was shocked to see two pink sentences written across his forehead.
At first a scowl darkened his face, but then he laughed.
She must have written some witty prose indeed to sneak the Jejunus curse onto him without his noticing.
Careful not to trip in the dim firelight, Nicodemus stepped through thecommon room to Devin’s door. Muted voices came from the other side. He knocked and walked in.
Simple John and Devin were sitting on her bed playing cat’s cradle, John’s favorite. They looked up.
“This was well done,” Nicodemus said while gesturing to his forehead and the pink words that read:
I Hate Fun.
But I LOVE Donkey Piss!
AFTER DEVIN HAD disspelled the curse from Nicodemus’s forehead, the three floormates gossiped about other cacographers and apprentices: who might be promoted, who was sneaking into whose bed, that sort of thing.
Though still exhausted, Nicodemus was happy to stay up with his friends and forget about druids and Astrophell delegates and the other nebulous dangers the night had presented.
As they talked, John and Nicodemus played cat’s cradle while Devin brushed out Nicodemus’s long raven hair.
“Why in heaven’s name,” she grumbled, “did the Creator waste such soft, glossy stuff on a man.”
Afterward she started to braid her own wiry red hair. “You know,” she said, “I’ve never been sure why all the magical societies have to send delegates to these convocations.”
“There’s never been one in Starhaven before?” Nicodemus asked without looking up from the game of cat’s cradle.
“Not since I’ve been here. They only happen once every thirty years, and they have to rotate through all the other libraries and monasteries or whatever.”
Nicodemus chewed his lip. “Well, I don’t know all the details about why the convocations happen, but—”
“—but you’ve memorized everything Shannon’s ever said about them,” Devin interjected with a leer.
He stuck his tongue out at her and continued. “So, back during the Dialect Wars—when the Neosolar Empire was falling and the new kingdoms were forming—spellwrights would join the fighting. The result was so bloody that the people couldn’t protect themselves from the lycanthropes or kobolds or whatever. For a while, it seemed there might not be any humans left, so all the magical societies signed treaties agreeing never again to take part in the wars that kingdoms fought.”
Devin grunted. “And so now all magical societies have to renew their treaties at these conventions or we’ll all end up in lycanthrope bellies?”
Nicodemus shrugged. “Something like that. It’s complicated. Some societies cheat. I think Magister Shannon was involved in stopping the wizards and hierophants from clashing in the Spirish Civil War. But I’m not sure; he never talks about the war.”
Simple John tried to say “Simple John” but yawned instead. Nicodemus ended the game of cat’s cradle and sent the big man lumbering off to bed.
Nicodemus started for his own room but then stopped at Devin’s door. “Dev, when should I ask Shannon about teaching again? With the convocation happening, things are probably too busy.”
She was tapping her chin with the end of her braid. “Actually, the busier wizards are, the more they want to unload their teaching duties onto apprentices. But it’s not Magister you need to convince. It’s the other wizards who gripe when a cacographer gets in front of a classroom.”
Nicodemus nodded and thought about what it would feel like to finally earn a hood. Then he remembered something. “Dev, have you ever worked with Magister Smallwood?”
“That sweet old linguist who’s got less common sense than a drunken chicken? Yeah, I used to run Shannon’s messages to him back when you were still
trying to undress that Amy Hern girl. Do you ever hear from her?”
Nicodemus folded his arms. “I don’t, but never mind that. I had a conversation with Smallwood today. Nothing important. But he said I was Shannon’s ‘new cacographic project’ or his new ‘pet cacographer.’ Do you know if there are current rumors going around about Magister?”
Devin dropped her braid and hopped out of bed. “Ignore it. Smallwood’s just being a ninny.” She went to her washstand and began to scrub her face. “So what class do you want to teach?”
“Anything to do with composition. But you’re avoiding my question. What are the rumors about Shannon and ‘pet cacographers’?”
Devin toweled her face. “Just academics gossiping and being petty.”
“Dev, not once in the past nine years have I known you to refrain from gossiping.”
“So let’s gossip. I’d forgotten about Amy Hern. She left for Starfall, right? Why don’t you write her on the next colaboris spell?”
Nicodemus waited for Devin to finish drying her face. “Dev, the rumors.”
She examined his face. “Not now, Nico; it’s late.”
“I’m not going to forget.”
“No.” She sighed. “You won’t.”
CHAPTER
Eight
The Gimhurst Tower stood at the southern edge of Starhaven’s inhabited quarters. Long ago, during the Lornish occupation, it had hosted the Lord Governor’s court. Now, save for the scriptorium at its top, the place was abandoned.
With Azure perched on his shoulder, Shannon stole down the tenth floor’s outer hallway. Through the parrot’s eyes, he regarded the pale moonbeams that slanted through the windows and splashed against the slate floors. The reflected glow lit the hallway’s opposite wall and its many sculpted panels. The low-relief carvings presented typical Lornish sensibility—bold and graceful figures without fine detail.
Slowly Shannon passed carved knights, serpents, and seraphs—these last wreathed with tattered gold leaf halos.
A half hour before, Azure had returned to his study after delivering his message to Nicodemus. She had seen nothing unusual on the rooftops. This had only increased Shannon’s anxiety for information and so prompted his current expedition.
To his left a space between two panels presented a short, wooden door. Shannon placed Azure on a windowsill opposite and instructed her to send a warning if anyone appeared. A rook’s croaking voice came from somewhere out in the night. He turned back to the door. Behind it lay Nora Finn’s “private library.”
Many academics, rightly distrustful of their peers, hid their most important manuscripts in well-defended secret archives. Maintaining such “private libraries” violated scores of academy bylaws, but the practice was so widespread that no dean or provost dared enforce any of those laws.
Fifty years ago, a newly arrived Shannon had suspected Nora of spying on him for his enemies in the North. He had been brash then, still accustomed to Astrophell’s infighting, and so had secretly pried into every aspect of Nora’s life. His search had disproved his suspicions and uncovered the location of this private library.
Slowly Shannon ran his finger down the door before him. Blindness prevented him from seeing the pine boards that felt so hard under his fingers.
This was just as well; the boards weren’t really there. They were subtexts—prose crafted to elude even the trained eye. Most spellwrights struggled to glean subtexts if only because they believed their eyes. When encountering a door’s texture or image, a human mind rarely accepted any conclusion other than that the door existed. Only with knowledge of the author’s purpose could a reader hope to see past a subtext’s semblance to its true meaning.
Shannon, however, was free of vision’s tyranny. He stared into the dark before him and considered how Nora would have written the subtext. First she would have chosen a primary language. Numinous was the obvious choice—it possessed the ability to create illusions by bending light. To the spell’s central passages, Nora must have added a few Magnus paragraphs to provide a physical barrier and give texture to the illusion.
After choosing her languages, Nora would have chosen particular sentence structures and diction to help her hide the spell.
Shannon ruminated on Nora’s prose style. As he did so, he saw faint golden runes float downward in ordered columns. Now he deduced what must be written between the lines. The faint sentences brightened. Slowly the text’s central argument revealed itself, and Shannon gazed upon a door-shaped waterfall of golden prose interlaced with silver sentences.
Out of habit, he undid the silver and gold buttons that ran down his sleeves. His eyes could now see through cloth, but it still felt more natural to spellwrite with arms bare.
Once ready, he wrote a short disspell in his right forearm and slipped it into his hand. This disspell, though composed of powerful Numinous runes, was thin and delicate. Lesser authors would have crafted their most powerful disspell and hacked through the door-subtext like a peasant chopping a tree trunk. Such a crude style would have produced a mangled subtext.
Shannon had spent too many decades sharpening his prose to leave behind such obvious evidence.
With the disspell complete, Shannon drew the text from his palm so it could fold into its proper conformation. This done, he wrote a brief handle onto the blade.
Then, holding the disspell as if it were a paintbrush, he leaned forward and chivvied its cutting edge between two of the door’s sentences. With slow, patient pressure he teased apart the subtext’s outer sentences to reveal its knotted central passage. Two quick strokes split one of its paragraphs.
With a high grinding whine, the door’s golden sentences began to churn as they detected the intrusion and sought to clamp down on Shannon’s hand.
But with calm determination, he edited two new Numinous sentences into the split paragraph. The grinding sound died and the subtext quieted.
With steady pinching motions, he darned the central passage. As his hand slowly withdrew, the glassy sentences flowed back into their original conformation.
A smile curled Shannon’s lips. The arch-chancellor himself wouldn’t know the subtext had been edited. The door clicked softly as it unlocked and swung open. Behind it stood a small space filled with the multichromatic gleam of a magical library.
Shannon cast a quick spell to Azure asking if she had seen anything. The parrot answered negatively and complained of the late hour. Smiling at her snappishness, Shannon left her on the windowsill to keep lookout and then stepped into Nora’s private library. He would not need mundane vision in such a textual environment.
It was a small space: five feet wide, ten deep. Though Shannon could not see the bookshelves that lined the walls, he recognized many of the texts they held. Nora had been studying textual exchanges between Starhaven’s gargoyles—a subject that provided insight into how magical constructs learned and thought. Shannon’s research also focused on textual intelligence; as a result, he possessed many of the same books that Nora had in her private library.
One unfamiliar codex attracted his eye. It lay alone at the back of the room, apparently on a low shelf or chest. Carefully he stepped to the library’s end and retrieved the manuscript. It was Nora’s personal research journal.
He flipped through the first few pages. Here lay a detailed study of how gargoyles selected information to share with each other. If he could take this book to his study for just one hour, his own research would leap forward. He had made any number of offhand remarks to other wizards about how much he should like to peruse Nora’s notes.
Virtue briefly fought ambition in his heart. “I’ll regret this tomorrow,” he grumbled as morality forced him to continue to flip through the book rather than take it away. Toward its end, he found a personal journal with dated entries.
The majority were complaints about librarians, apprentices, colleagues. Twice he scowled at disparaging remarks about “that blustering Shannon.”
It wasn’t until
he reached a date eleven years past that an entry lifted his eyebrows: “Missive from Spirish noble. Wanted ‘to see his sleeping boy.’ His father? Boy new to D.Tower. Payment in gold sovereigns.”
The next winter, Nora had written, “Spirish master to see sleeping boy in D.Tower.” Two days later, “Spirish payment.”
“Los’s fiery blood! Nora was in a noble’s purse?” Shannon whispered. The bribing of wizards was rampant in Astrophell and Starfall Keep. But Starhaven, as the only academy removed from the human kingdoms, had known little of such corruption.
Shannon wondered if he’d become soft. Despite competing academically with Nora, he had stopped investigating her private affairs—something he would have found unthinkable in Astrophell.
He reread the journal entries. The “D.Tower” clearly was the Drum Tower. But why would someone pay to see a sleeping boy? It seemed that Nora had supposed the man to be his father.
Shannon frowned at the phrase “Boy new to D.Tower” and thought about which cacographers had moved into the Drum Tower eleven years ago.
A sudden chill ran through his veins. Nicodemus was the only one.
Worse, that was the year the academy had judged Nicodemus’s cacography to be proof that he wasn’t the Halcyon.
“Creator be merciful,” Shannon whispered. Perhaps the academy had misjudged Nicodemus’s connection to the Erasmine Prophecy. If so, then these were the last days before the War of Disjunction—the final battle to save human language from demonic corruption.
Shannon continued to flip through the book. Two more entries, each four years apart, read “Master to see boy” and were followed by “Spirish Payment. ” The final entry, dated two days ago, read “Master’s msg confused? No meeting but Strange Dreams about such.”
Whoever had been bribing Nora had changed how he was to meet her. Had he then pushed her off the Spindle Bridge?
Shannon turned the final page and drew a sudden breath. Written hastily across the page was a sharply worded spell. The dangerous text shone with the brilliant silvery light of Magnus.
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