Spellwright

by Charlton, Blake

  Garkex—a stone-skinned, three-horned firetroll with serrated tusks—scolded the other monsters in an unintelligible, squeaky voice. The troll was holding the Index above his head.

  The sight made Nicodemus wonder if he had gone mad. What he remembered seemed like a hallucination or a nightmare. Had he truly met Fellwroth and learned that his parents were demon-worshipers?

  As he considered this question, Garkex’s cries seemed to calm the other monsters. They stopped their flight to peer back at Nicodemus.

  Garkex continued his unintelligible harangue. Slowly, like frightened dogs, the monsters returned. Some were bowing, some lowering their muzzles or eye-stalks.

  The firetroll planted himself directly before Nicodemus and presented the Index.

  Nicodemus shook himself. No, he wasn’t crazy; he truly had encountered Fellwroth, and he truly was staring at Garkex—his fictional childhood nemesis.

  He took the Index from the diminutive troll and hugged it to his chest. Garkex began to lecture him—his horns spitting minute orange flames when he squeaked out more vehement syllables.

  Nicodemus stared blankly at the monsters as they lifted him up and recommenced their journey through the forest. He wondered if he should try to flee.

  But if the night terrors had wanted him dead, they could have torn him to pieces when he fainted. Or they might simply have let Fellwroth find him.

  He decided to let the monsters carry him.

  As they went among the widely spaced trees, speckled moonlight passed over them. Their course brought the party to a mountainside creek, which the monsters crossed with impressive speed. Then Nicodemus found himself being carried through a wilderness of sword ferns that tickled his legs. Garkex chastised the vegetation for getting in their way.

  When they passed into another patch of moonlight, Nicodemus saw the cold turn his breath into pale jets of air.

  The monsters marched through meadows, along ponds, and through dense thickets. Scattered through the forest were dead or dying trees. Watching this scenery, Nicodemus thought about what Fellwroth had told him.

  Could he believe the golem? Could it be true that a demon had arranged his birth?

  Nicodemus’s heart beat faster. From the day he had learned that he was a cacographer, everything had seemed to be error. Life wasn’t what it was “supposed” to be. He wasn’t supposed to be a source of misspelled, dangerous language. He was supposed to be the Halcyon, the wellspring of con-structive, healing texts.

  But now it seemed that his disability, his monstrosity, was exactly what was meant to have happened. He came from a family of demon-worshipers. He had been bred to be a monster.

  It was possible that Fellwroth had lied. But some instinct deep inside Nicodemus knew that the golem had been telling the truth.

  “I won’t be a demon’s puppet!” Nicodemus growled, clenching his hands. The golem had said that those of Imperial blood could be tools used to assist or resist the Disjunction.

  Well then, he would become a weapon for the resistance.

  He closed his eyes and imagined the Emerald of Arahest. Its brilliant,lacriform shape appeared before him. Here was his salvation. He would focus his every desire on recovering the gem. And when he had it back, his mind would be complete. Then he could oppose the Disjunction.

  Suddenly the keloid scars on his neck grew hot. “Fiery heaven!” he swore.

  Fellwroth had said that the keloids were betraying his location by broadcasting spells written in a language he couldn’t see. But the golem had also said that some force was diffusing these same spells. He supposed the night terrors now carrying him were the force interfering with the keloids’ spells. But despite the diffusion, Fellwroth could still approximate his whereabouts.

  There was no escape.

  And there was the dragon to think of. What if Fellwroth truly had used the emerald to create the dragon that attacked Trillinon? Could Nicodemus continue to live knowing his death would delay another such attack? Did he have a responsibility to kill himself?

  No, he silently vowed, he would not be ruled by fear.

  He closed his eyes and cleared his mind. The image of the emerald returned, instantly, vividly. A warm tingling spread across his face. Instinctively, he knew then that what Fellwroth had said was true—the gem was seeking to return to him.

  The thought of regaining the emerald made his heart race.

  “Calm yourself,” he whispered, struggling to control his roiling emotions. He needed to think logically. His next step should be to find Deirdre and learn what he could from her.

  Just then the monsters carried him into a pine thicket so dense that they were surrounded by complete blackness. Even midday sunlight would not penetrate here.

  Garkex puffed small flames from his horns. The resultant light pierced the gloom to reveal a small cliff face that extended in both directions. The night terrors tramped directly toward it as if it weren’t there. Nicodemus had just enough time to throw his arms up before they crashed into the rock face.

  Nothing happened.

  When he lowered his hands, Nicodemus saw that they had passed right through the small cliff face onto a moonlit promontory. He swore and looked back. The rock wall had been a fiction, an ingeniously written subtext.

  Garkex let out a screech, and the night terrors gently set Nicodemus down on a patch of moss.

  The party now stood on a knoll that overlooked a moonlit clearing scattered with ivy-covered stone arches, low towers, and crumbling walls.

  Nicodemus stared. Once this must have had been one of Starhaven’soutlying Chthonic villages. He had read of how the Neosolar Legion had destroyed all such settlements during the Siege of Starhaven.

  But why had these ruins been hidden by a subtext?

  Garkex began talking rapidly and gesticulating at Nicodemus and the Index. The other monsters bowed. Suddenly Garkex’s right arm dissolved into a cloud of indigo runes.

  “You’re constructs!” Nicodemus exclaimed. “Written in the Index’s purple language.”

  The firetroll marched up to Nicodemus and held out his right hand. Tentatively Nicodemus placed his own palm on top of the construct’s. Garkex said something softly as he shook his partially deconstructed arm. A glowing sentence fell from the troll’s text. The violet words landed on the back of Nicodemus’s hand and bore into his skin.

  He cried out and jerked his hand back.

  But the firetroll was whispering softly and pointing to his arm. In amazement, Nicodemus turned his hand over and saw that the sentence had been tattooed onto his skin.

  Nicodemus knew that every magical language could inscribe itself into only one type of medium. The common and wizardly languages took only to paper or parchment. Druids set their higher languages only into wood. The highsmiths etched their spells only on metal. And apparently whoever had created the Index’s violet language had tattooed their prose into living skin.

  Slowly Garkex disintegrated into prose and wrote himself onto Nicodemus’s forearm. It was unsettling, but painless, to watch the spell slip under his skin.

  When it was finished, Nicodemus marveled at the flowing script now coiling down his hand and forearm. Next Tamelkan, the eyeless dragon, appeared before him and began to write herself onto Nicodemus’s other arm.

  And then all of the monsters were on him, disintegrating and tattooing themselves into his skin.

  “Wait,” Nicodemus said, suddenly afraid. “Not so many; I…” His voice died.

  It was over. Every last one of the night terrors was gone.

  He stared down at his hands. He hiked up his robes to look at his shins. He even peered down his collar at his chest. Everywhere he was inscribed with flowing, violet text.

  “I imagined all of you for my boyhood dreams,” he said while examining the language on his palms. “So how could I have written you? I learned the Index’s purple language a few hours ago, but I dreamed up Garkex when my voice broke, Fael and Tamelkan when I still had pimples.”
>
  He shook his head. Maybe he actually had gone mad. “How could I have written you?”

  A glow made him look up. Floating before him was a purple spell.

  “Who cast that?” Nicodemus called, looking around for the spell’s author. “Who’s there?”

  The night was empty save for the rubble, silent but for the wind in the trees.

  The spell floated toward Nicodemus. He raised his hands and stepped back.

  But the spell stopped and unfolded into two parts.

  Now curious, Nicodemus peered at the first subspell. It was an instructional text describing how the purple language could encode for written language.

  Familiar with analogous protocols that allowed wizards to conduct silent conversations in Numinous, Nicodemus quickly grasped how the spell functioned.

  The second part of the purple spell seemed to be an encoded sentence. Nicodemus grabbed it and applied the translation protocol. The resulting line read, “It was Starhaven who wrote them.”

  Nicodemus puzzled over those words until he remembered staring at the tattoos on his hand and asking, “How could I have written you?”

  Again fear jolted through him. “Who cast this?” he repeated and again spun around in a frightened attempt to find the mysterious spellwright. “Who’s there?”

  No sound came, but as Nicodemus turned round again he discovered another purple spell floating in the air.

  Tentatively, he caught the paragraph and translated it.

  The indigo language you refer to is called Wrixlan. It is our language for manipulating light and text, much like your Numinous. Wrixlan metaspells fill Starhaven. Your mind sought out Wrixlan because it is eugraphic. You dreamed of these creatures, and Starhaven’s metaspells sympathetically took the shape of your dreams. When your creatures achieved enough intelligence, the language governing Starhaven perceived them as a threat and so banished them. That is why the constructs hated you so. You had unknowingly exiled them.

  “Who are you?” Nicodemus’s wide eyes darted about but saw nothing but ruins and ivy vines. “Where are you?”

  As before Nicodemus found another Wrixlan paragraph floating behind him. He grabbed and translated it.

  I see the products of your adolescent purple prose have forgiven you. They could have stored themselves in your living codex. But they will draw more strength from your skin. I have been trying to convince them to bring you here.

  Nicodemus shook his head. “What do you want? Show yourself!”

  This time he saw the textual response form in midair. It looked as if the characters were condensing from moonlight. It read,

  I want only a small favor. I can offer many answers. You are in no danger; we are weak. We cannot affect the physical world and can affect the textual world only slightly.

  Nicodemus swallowed hard, realizing what this meant. “You’re dead?”

  The construct appeared first as a soft violet glow among the ivy vines. Then tiny indigo sparks formed in the air and began to swarm, slowly coa-lescing into legs and a torso.

  As the construct moved toward Nicodemus, it became more solid and took on shades of white, indigo, and gray. But its prose never congealed completely. Nicodemus could see through the construct to the collapsed buildings on the other side.

  At first glance it might have been mistaken for a human child of eight or ten. Its spindly legs presented knobby knees and wide feet. Its slight torso was covered by a white tunic that afforded a short sleeve for the right arm only.

  The construct didn’t seem to have a left arm. But its right arm was long and graceful, with a large elbow joint and narrow forearm. Its single hand was wide, its fingers long and slender.

  The spell was climbing toward Nicodemus on an ivy-covered staircase. As it moved, it leaned forward to use its elongated right hand as an extra foot.

  Nicodemus stepped back as it reached the top of the promontory. Its skin was pale gray, its long hair snowy white.

  Its eyes were as wide as a man’s fist, their pupils slit vertically like a cat’s. Its beaklike nose bent over a soft chin.

  It smiled to reveal flat teeth and then cast a Wrixlan sentence into the air. “You are correct: we are dead. Welcome, spellwright, to our final resting place.” It bowed.

  After taking a deep breath, Nicodemus bowed to what could only be a Chthonic ghost.

  CHAPTER

  Thirty-three

  A sharp knock woke Amadi in her cot. For a confused moment she stared at the stark white walls of her Starhaven cell. In her dream she had been wrestling a giant bookworm. Her now bandaged forearm ached.

  The knock came again and she struggled up from her pallet. Outside her window the sky was still black. “Who knocks?”

  “Kale, Magistra.”

  “Enter,” she called to her secretary and pulled on a night robe.

  The young Ixonian slipped into the room.

  “Kale, I shudder to see you. I can’t have slept more than an hour. Has the bookworm infection returned?”

  “No, Magistra.” The man’s eyes were wide. “Another death, one of the cacographers.”

  Amadi drew in a sharp breath. “Shannon escaped?”

  “No, he’s still imprisoned beneath the Summer Tower. Nicodemus’s female floormate, Devin Dorshear, is dead. Both Nicodemus and the big man they call Simple John are missing. Near midnight the young cacographers heard shouting. Until a quarter hour ago, they were too frightened to leave their rooms.”

  Amadi swore. “But the wards. No one should be able to get in or out of that tower.”

  Kale pressed a hand to his mouth. “I take full responsibility, Magistra. I was the one who suggested we leave the tower unguarded. It seems Shannon somehow slipped Nicodemus a key to lift the wards. I take full responsibility.”

  “Nonsense,” Amadi snapped. “I had the command.” She turned to her bed chest. “Rouse the sentinels. Alert all the guards. I want a search begun before I’m fully dressed. I’ll personally go to the provost’s officers.”

  Kale nodded and turned to go.

  “But Kale, I’ll first examine the dead cacographer. I want two of our sentinels on hand. Where did the murder happen?”

  The man paused at the door and looked back. “Drum Tower, top floor.I’ll send two spellwrights straight away. Nothing’s been touched…but the body, Magistra, it’s…gruesome.”

  A QUARTER HOUR after being awakened with news of Nicodemus’s disappearance, Amadi found herself in the Drum Tower frowning at a dead lesser wizard.

  The girl’s face had been crushed by blunt words. A puddle of drying blood surrounded her body. “The killer was a clumsy spellwright,” Amadi said to the sentinels behind her. “Must have used a leadshot spell or something simple.”

  Amadi clenched her teeth. She was almost certain Shannon was guilty of some foul play. Surely the old wizard was in the pay of a magically illiterate noble. Why else would he have hidden so much money in his quarters? Why else would he be connected to the bookworm infestation?

  However, now it seemed she was dealing with two murderers. “A cacographer did this,” she said. “Nicodemus or the big one.”

  She wondered if Nicodemus had killed Nora Finn at Shannon’s behest. “You there,” she said to one of sentinels. “Go to the Summer Tower and rouse Shannon. I need some questions answered.”

  With a nod, the man ducked out of the common room.

  “Another strange thing is all this dust,” Amadi grumbled, now pacing about. Mostly the powder was scattered across the room, but next to the door lay a pile of the stuff covered by what looked like a white bed sheet. Even stranger, one corner held a small mound of splinters.

  “You,” Amadi said to the remaining sentinel, a tall woman with gray hair. “Search the other Drum Tower residences. Tell me if you find similar dust or splinters in any other room.”

  As the woman hurried through the door, Kale appeared. He was chewing his lower lip. A bad sign. “What is it, Kale?”

  “Word from the
librarians, Magistra. One of Starhaven’s most valuable artifacts is missing.”

  “Destroyed by a bookworm?” she asked.

  The secretary shook his head. “It was in a secure chamber and the Main Library was never infested.”

  Amadi closed her eyes and took a long breath. “Let me guess: either Shannon or Nicodemus was the last one to use this artifact.”

  Kale nodded. “There’s more. The artifact is a reference codex called the Index; it can access all text stored in Starhaven. And whoever has the artifact has looked up the touch spell.”

  “And how do we know this?”

  “Every copy of the touch spell in the academy is now misspelled.”

  Amadi frowned. “By accessing texts through this artifact the user is misspelling them?”

  Kale nodded. “And all the misspelled touch scrolls are infectious. They cause manuscripts touching them to misspell. An entire pedagogical library in the Marfil Tower has been destroyed.”

  “Nicodemus!” Amadi growled. “If the boy accesses a text in the Stacks or the Main Library, he could destroy all of Starhaven’s holdings.”

  Kale nodded again.

  Amadi swore. “First the bookworm infestation, now this. Chaos incarnate has come to Starhaven.”

  “Magistra…are you saying—”

  “Do you doubt it, Kale? Think of the disorder that has spread across Starhaven. Think of the murders, the deaths, the corruption. Think of the scar—an Inconjunct breaking the Braid. The boy seems destined to spread chaos.”

  Kale took a long breath. “We cannot be certain the counter-prophecy is coming to pass.”

  “Cannot be certain, but we now have enough evidence that we must act.”

  She made for the door. “I will question the librarians. I want to learn more about this artifact. You will go to the Erasmine Tower and tell the onduty officers what has happened. If we don’t catch the boy, his mind will rot the pages from our books as a tumor rots flesh. They must wake the provost and tell him that most likely we’ve found the Storm Petrel.”