The voices died and in their place sounded a long series of rhythmic, echoing clacks.
And then Nicodemus stood in the cavern of his previous nightmare—low ceiling, gray floors, a black stone table. The body lying upon it was again covered in white. Again a teardrop emerald lay in its gloved hands.
But new to the cavern was a standing stone, as tall as a man and as broad as a horse. It stood behind the black table. Three undulating lines flowed from the stone’s top down to its base.
White, vinelike stalks erupted from the ground and swayed to an unfelt breeze. The stalks sprouted pale ivy leaves and began to intertwine. Within moments, a knee-high snarl of albino ivy covered the floor.
“I was the demon’s slave,” a low voice rumbled. It came from everywhere. “I cut him in the river.” The voice grew louder. “I cut him in the river!”
Nicodemus tried to run, but the pale ivy entangled his legs. He tried to scream, but his throat produced only a long painful hiss. He reached down to pull at the weeds but froze when he saw his hands covered by the hexagonal plates of a turtle’s shell.
Suddenly he could not move so much as his eyelid. From toe to top hair he was encased in thick black shell.
“I CUT HIM IN THE RIVER!”
A blinding red light enveloped Nicodemus. Agony lanced through his every fiber as his shell shattered.
Looking up, he saw the emerald produce a sphere of light—wispy and sallow at the edges, but blazing green at its core.
The small emerald’s radiance grew until it burned the cavern and everything in it into airy nothingness.
Above stretched a pale-blue sky, below, lush savanna grass. Ancient oak trees dotted a hillside that overlooked the wide, green water of a reservoir. Nicodemus recognized the place as a springtime Spirish meadow near his father’s stronghold.
In the meadow’s center, a tattered blanket provided seating for a young boy and a woman. She was a rare beauty: pale skin with a light spray of freckles, bright hazel eyes set above a snub nose, thin lips, a delicate chin.
But her most stunning feature was the long bronze hair cascading down her back in slow curls that glinted gold in the sunlight.
A book, a knightly romance, sat in the woman’s lap. Her lips moved as she read from it but the dream provided no sound.
The boy had long black hair and a dark olive complexion. He was perhaps eight years old and gazed at the woman with fierce green eyes. This was as much a memory as it was a dream.
The woman’s name was April, the boy’s Nicodemus.
This was a vision of long ago when Lord Severn—Nicodemus’s father—had seen fit to educate his bastard. The lord had brought April into his household ostensibly to educate his son, but most everyone knew the lord visited her chamber at night.
April had been a kind teacher but not a determined one. After Nicodemus’s first dozen futile reading lessons, she began reading her favorite books aloud to him. Being Lornish, April had been enamored of knightly romances. And after the first tale of maidens and monsters, so was the young Nicodemus.
The dream became fluid. The vision of April and his young self began to flicker. Now Nicodemus’s image was ten years old. There were flashes of Nicodemus reading alone, but more often he was with April, begging her for something.
Memory provided the details the dream left out. In what was perhaps the only shrewd act of her life, April had noticed Nicodemus’s interest in knightly romance and began reading to him less and less. When possible, she stopped at a tale’s most exciting point, claiming she was too tired to continue.
The young Nicodemus yearned to learn what happened next in each story, but his progress was slow. At times he confused his frustration regarding the text with his frustration regarding his governess’s body.
Noticing his improvement, April ceased reading to him entirely but supplied more books. Now the dream showed only images of Nicodemus reading alone.
The dream world shifted. Gone were the meadow and sunshine.Nicodemus now watched his ten-year-old self lying abed in his small Severn Hold chamber. He was reading a book titled Sword of Flame.
The bedside candles danced as several nights flickered by—this was the time when, in three agonizing months, Nicodemus had taught himself to read so that he might find out if Aelfgar, a noble paladin, could mend Cailus, his broken sword, with the Fire Stones of Ta’nak, and then wield it to free the beautiful Shahara from Zade, an evil cleric who commanded the snakelike Zadsernak.
Although the youthful Nicodemus had had trouble remembering the many silly invented names, he was delighted with the story’s inevitable course and eager to read the next twenty-seven books in the series, though he doubted that they were all as good.
Time flickered again. Now Nicodemus saw the warm night on which he had finished Sword of Flame. His young self laid the book down on his chest and fell asleep to the sound of spring rain and the cries of a full robin’s nest outside his window.
“No,” the adult Nicodemus moaned. On this night, in a dream about April, he would be born to magic. The resulting magical effulgence would set the entire western wing of Severn Hold on fire, killing a horse and maiming two stable boys.
“Wake!” Nicodemus shouted. “Wake up!” But his boyish self slept on. He tried to move but found his adult legs paralyzed. The window above young Nicodemus creaked open.
A thick arm of ghostly white ivy vines grew with jerky, nightmare speed onto the window frame and surrounded the bed. The adult Nicodemus yelled again, trying to wake himself.
The nightmare ivy hadn’t been there when he had been a boy. But now its pale tentacles leaped onto the bed and within moments blanketed the dreaming child with ashen leaves. The world exploded with light. Everywhere flames roared. A horse screamed its death as the rafters came crashing down around Nicodemus. The stone walls tottered and then fell with a deep, grinding growl.
Suddenly nothing hung above Nicodemus but a too-low nightmare sky of seething gray text. Next to him stood April, untouched by flames. “Run, Nicodemus!” she cried. “He has your shadow!” Darkness radiated from her, blotting out the nightmare sky.
“There is no safe place!” Her hair became trains of stars and spread across the growing night sky.
“The white beast will find you unless you fly from Starhaven! Fly with anything you have!”
Her body faded into nothing and her face became the glowing face of the white moon.
“Fly and don’t look back!”
There was a deafening crash and then…blackness.
“Never look back!”
AMADI WAS SITTING in the hallway, using two Magnus clauses to pick splinters from her forearm, when Kale found her.
“Magistra! What happened?”
She flinched as a clause drew out a half inch of bloody wood. “Bookworms infested both sides of a bridge. We were containing the first blast when the second went off in my ear. The deputy provost was right: these worms have an uncanny intelligence. Every time it seems we’ve deconstructed the last one, another violent deconstruction pulls us back into a fray.”
She looked up at her secretary. He had several scrolls tucked under one arm and a thick codex under the other. Behind him stood the two sentinels who had been guarding Shannon’s quarters.
“And what in the burning hells took you so long?” she asked. “The Drum Tower guards were here an hour ago.”
Kale smiled. “News most wonderful! We found a wounded bookworm responding to a leftover homing passage.”
He held out one of the scrolls. “Six minor libraries are fighting infestation now. But so far the Main Library has remained free of infection, thank Hakeem. And Starhaven is doing a remarkable job of hiding the whole affair. But still, there is fierce fighting in all of the infected libraries. And it seems that in one of them this bookworm was wounded in a very fortuitous way.”
“Fortuitous?” Amadi accepted the scroll.
“By chance, a disspell destroyed most of this bookworm’s executive text. So the construct
resorted to an older, previously disabled protocol about what to do if wounded.” He held out another scroll.
Amadi took it and then looked at the two sentinels who had been on guard duty. Kale was only a lesser wizard, and the bookworms were written in Numinous and Magnus. “You two subdued the construct and then parsed its structure?”
They nodded vigorously.
Kale piped up again. “All the other wounded bookworms have been returning to another location. But this one had been wounded in such a way that it couldn’t. However, we were able to learn where it should have gone.”
Amadi raised her eyebrows.
“The bookworms have been subtextualizing themselves and returning to a private library in a tower near the Bolide Garden,” he explained. “There they’ve been engulfing some text stored there. Once recovered they head back out to infect other libraries.”
“So the author of these bookworms set up this private library as a base for the bookworms?”
Kale held out the rest of his scrolls and the codex. “Just so. And the worms can subtextualize themselves well enough that we never would have found it if it weren’t for this wounded worm. In any case, when we found the place, we disspelled the worms and then investigated. That’s where we found these.”
Amadi set the scrolls on the ground and turned her attention to the codex. “And what are they?”
“What you’re holding now is Nora Finn’s research journal.”
Amadi looked up sharply. “The journal Shannon claimed the clay monster ran off with?”
Kale’s smile seemed wide enough to split his face in half. “Exactly! It seems that Nora Finn was taking bribes from a Spirish noble to watch a certain student. And seems there still is another spy. That scroll there contains notes about a correspondence with a different Spirish duke and an Ixoanian admiral. We couldn’t figure out why, but the nobles seem to be paying the author to disrupt this convocation.”
“We had two spies for Spirish nobles in Starhaven?” Amadi half-squawked. “Nora Finn and the owner of the private library? And this second spy took bribes to set these bookworms loose?”
“Worse than that,” the secretary added. “The scrolls by your feet are drafts of curses written to infiltrate a spellwright’s body and force it to overexert itself!”
Amadi felt her hands go numb. “Like the misspell that killed Nora Finn and the neophyte. Did you find any evidence of the remaining spy’s identity?”
Kale shook his head. “Of course not. The author was too intelligent for that. But Magistra, remember the first bookworm we found; it should have returned to this private library, but it was damaged in such a way that it accidentally returned to a previously designated location. Well, we searched that location and found a hidden chest filled with an appalling number of Spirish and Ixonian coins. And Magistra, you forgot to ask where that location was.”
Amadi looked at Kale and then at the two sentinels behind him. “No, don’t tell me,” she said, pressing a hand to her forehead. “I already know.”
CHAPTER
Twenty-five
Though Shannon had been sincere when he told Nicodemus to rest while it was still possible, the grand wizard found himself walking not to his quarters, but to his study. Neither of the sentinels following him objected; they would be up all night no matter if he was lying in bed or sitting at a desk.
After leaving the guards outside and locking the door, Shannon put Azure on a perch and assured her she could sleep. He knew his study well enough to move about without mundane vision.
Though he was exhausted, the idea of a golem had roused his curiosity. How could magical language create such a being? As he pondered this question, habit prompted him to retrieve his research journal and absently finger the three asterisks embossed on its face.
As far as he knew, a spell could gain intelligence only from one of two processes: “direction” and “impression.”
Authors creating “direct” textual intelligence had to write clever prose. At its simplest level, this required strings of instructions: if this happens, then do that; if that does not happen, then do this and so on. More complex methods directed constructs to recognize patterns or develop evolving webs of decision-making sentences.
However, any “directly” intelligent spell fell short of an “impressed” counterpart. Descended from an ancient spell that survived the Exodus, “impression” used two Numinous matrices. The first matrix inhabited a living mind; the second, a spell’s executive language. If physically close, an impressing matrix began to mimic the thought processes of a living mind. In this way spellwrights could “impress” aspects of their own intelligence into texts.
Shannon had given Azure fluency in Numinous through impression, and most gargoyles and all ghosts required a living mind after which to model their thoughts.
What excited Shannon about the golem spell was its implicit connection to impression. To animate a golem, a spellwright had to invest his textual “spirit” into earthen body. To form a spirit spell, an author would haveto use a radical form of impression that translated his mind into a text. That would leave the author’s body an empty husk until its spirit returned.
So before investing his spirit into a golem, a spellwright would have to plan for his spirit’s return to his body. Therefore, a golem would need an escape subspell allowing a spirit to eject itself from a wounded golem.
What Shannon wanted to do was write a linguistic attack that would hinder or destroy a golem’s escape subspell. If he could do that, he might slay the golem’s author without finding the fiend’s living body.
Shannon worked with an excitement he had not known for a half century. After skimming the relevant texts, he had an idea of what functions an escape subspell would have to perform. That left him the task of deducing how a text might fulfill those functions and how an attack spell might interrupt those same functions.
In an hour, he had an outline.
Writing the spell proved more difficult. He worked in Numinous and stored the early drafts on older scrolls. The latter drafts he wrote onto his best parchment. At times his hands shook with excitement and made it difficult to place the lines.
After four hours, he had finished a working draft. At nearly eight thousand characters, it occupied twenty-four pages of his research journal. His fingers ached from gripping the smooth runes. He set about putting in a few expository notes so that he wouldn’t forget how the trickier passages operated.
“Shannon, you’re still a linguist,” he congratulated himself when the spell was finished. “But you’re getting old.” He leaned back and let himself feel the soreness in his arms, the aching in his knees. The only thing keeping him awake was the knowledge that, if he cast his new spell on the golem, it would trap the author’s sprit inside the clay body.
Shannon sat back in his chair and listened to its familiar wooden creaking. Just then he realized he had to get a copy of this spell to Nicodemus immediately. Should he take it over to the Drum Tower now? It was vital that the boy have the spell. But how could he get it to him?
Azure made a low, two-note whistle. Shannon cast an inquiring sentence to her and received an instant reply: she had heard something unusual.
Shannon squinted at his door. No one was spellwriting in the hallway, but farther away, in what must have been a stairwell, shone a ten-foot trail of golden text. He had seen such a thing before: it was a train of a half dozen wizards, all casting flamefly spells to illuminate the dark stairs.
Something was wrong. Deadly wrong.
Shannon scooped up Azure and formed with her the textual exchangethat allowed him to see through her eyes. Back at his desk, he stared at the spell he had just written.
He had to get the text to Nicodemus; the boy’s life depended on it. Even more frightening, Nicodemus’s connection to prophecy meant that his survival might be essential for the fight against the Disjunction and hence for the preservation of human language.
“Hakeem, help me!” he w
hispered.
Glancing up, he saw the train of flamefly spells begin to wink out as their casters came closer.
He looked back at his spell. It was too long for Azure to carry in her body. And he didn’t have time to transfer it to a scroll and have Azure to fly it over. He needed something that was already written.
After scanning his desk, his blind eyes fell on familiar Numinous paragraphs. Azure provided a mundane image of the manuscript: it was the scroll that had, just a day and a half ago, granted him permission to begin research on the Index.
Hushed voices sounded in the hallway.
With shaking hands, Shannon found an inkhorn and a serviceable quill. He rarely wrote mundane letters and he did not trust his exhausted fingers to produce anything legible now. So he dipped the quill’s feathered end in ink and used it to paint a wide, sticky stripe over the mundane writing which had granted permission for his research.
Quickly he forged the Numinous paragraphs that would lift the ban on the Drum Tower’s door. He slapped these onto the head of the scroll along with a common language note which when translated would read “key for wards.”
Knocking sounded at the door. “Magister Shannon,” Amadi’s voice called.
“A moment!” Shannon replied. He had to write something more to Nicodemus about the other passages—had to do it before the sentinels could interfere. Amadi would never allow Nicodemus to have such a powerful text.
“Shannon,” Amadi called, “you must open this door!”
Shannon went blank with fear. How could he let Nicodemus know what he was thinking?
Suddenly his mind leaped forward with thought. He forged a few phrases that when translated would read “Research ***” and slapped it at the top of the scroll. Then he forged what would translate into the single word “Dogfood,” copied it once, and then thumbed one word above the first paragraph and the other above the second.
A wall of silvery text shown from the other side of the door; doubtless the sentinels were preparing to knock it down.
Shannon rolled up the scroll and bound it with a Magnus sentence. “To Nicodemus,” he whispered, binding the Magnus sentence to Azure’s foot. “And beware of the sentinels guarding the Drum Tower.” He repeated these instructions in Numinous.
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