Spellbreaker

by Blake Charlton

  Leandra laughed. “Remind me to get something nice for that dear man when we return to the city.”

  “I would suggest a gift of two thousand five hundred thirty-two rupees, or he may well burst a blood vessel.”

  “Right,” Leandra said with a sigh and turned back to her deck. “Tomorrow is going to be busy.” They drank silently and watched the torchlight reflected on the pool water. The fish carved their erratic circuits near the dock torch.

  At last Leandra announced that she would sleep. Dhrun shifted back into his Dhrunarman incarnation and took up guard near the ladder.

  Almost the instant Leandra put her head to the pillow, she fell into a dream of a dark seascape with a rolling deck beneath her. The ocean was filled with a whirlpool. A hundred feet above her, a billowing plume of smoke formed from nothing. Holokai and Thaddeus were there, both very angry. Then she was in a Dralish forest, everything so cool and green and the high oak boughs arching above her. Wind in the leaves. She was a child and her father’s voice was calling … calling …

  Leandra woke and the memory of the dream twisted into nothing. She tried to recall but her gut was filled with a sickening, queasy feeling, as if she were terribly worried. The more she tried to remember the dream, the faster it slipped away.

  Leandra sat up. The sky above the pool was filled with dappled clouds just barely illuminated with early dawn.

  Then Leandra realized that her gut didn’t hurt; rather, in an hour, most of her future selves would be frantically worried. It was the prophetic godspell.

  Something this morning was going to distress her. Scowling, Leandra rubbed her forehead where she supposed her godspell to be. She might not have bought the text if she had known that it would wake her an hour early every morning.

  Dhrun was standing guard, all four arms folded. He hadn’t moved since she fell asleep. She wondered what the deity thought about when he became so still.

  Leandra flopped back into bed, still irritated at her godspell, hoping to fall back asleep. But after a minute she realized her bladder was uncomfortably full. So, she hauled herself over to the chamber pot and then back to the sheets. But when she was lying still, she found she could not stop wondering about what was going to fill her with such apprehension in less than an hour’s time. She tossed and turned for a while longer and then gave up on sleep and walked out to her deck.

  The morning was darkening as a fat cloud occluded the sky above the pool. She looked down into the water, a few scattered rain drops were falling. A light, warm tropical rain.

  It was high tide now and the torch left on the dock was still burning. Leandra looked down into the pellucid water and was shocked to see a massive, nightmarelike figure slip through the now submarine opening that admitted her catamaran. The creature swam a powerful circle around the pool, causing the surface to churn into small whirlpools and eddies.

  Leandra hurried to the rope ladder. “Should I follow—” Dhrun asked before Leandra interrupted. “No, stay here. I’ll send for you in a moment.”

  She hurried down the ladder and across the boardwalk. By the time she reached the dock, Holokai was already sitting at its edge, wet, humanoid, naked. He was breathing hard but grinning. “Fast, huh?” he said with a grin. “I told you I was feeling strong. I think even more people have been praying for me lately. But, I could eat for three days straight.”

  “Poor hunting on the way back?” she asked. Usually Holokai returned from a long swim with a belly full of harbor seal.

  He shook his head. “No time. About five miles outside the Cerulean Strait, I circled a few times below an inbound Southern ship. But when I came near the surface, I woke something up. Never felt a presence like that before. Hey, Lea, why don’t you tell me next time you send me to surf a tidal wave, huh?” He laughed.

  Leandra’s belly began to hurt. “What do you mean?”

  “You know … you know how it is. My kind, in my element, I can feel another like me. I don’t like getting too close, especially in open water. But maybe that’s just me, you know?”

  “Holokai,” Leandra interrupted, her patience thinning, “what did you sense out there? Another god?”

  His face became thoughtful. “Yeah, like another god. But not another god, I don’t think. It’s funny, Lea, the presence … it was like … like…”

  Leandra’s belly began to ache with anxiety. “Did you breech?”

  “Very briefly, just got one eye above the water. Some of those Southern sailor boys like to get brave with harpoons and I’m hungry, yeah, but I’m not that hungry.” He grimaced, maybe remembering the last time he had eaten a sailor.

  “But the ship’s name, Kai, the thing written in gold leaf on the side of the ship, what did it read?”

  Holokai frowned. Reading was not his strong point when his eyes were all black. At last he said, “The High Queen’s Lance.”

  Leandra groaned. Her parents had fallen in love during the political intrigue in the Spirish city of Avel that involved a Spirish airship named the Queen’s Lance.

  “Lea, you know what I think the presence was that I felt. It was like … well … from what you told me I think it was like…”

  “Like a dragon?” Lea asked.

  “Hey, how’d you know?”

  Leandra growled a word in two clipped syllables as only an irate adult child can: “Moth-er.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Nicodemus and the neodemon wearing his daughter’s face stared at each other with incomprehension. “Your daughter’s face?” the River Thief asked.

  “You’re…” Nicodemus stuttered. “You’re impersonating her?”

  “Leandra Weal? The Warden of Ixos?” the River Thief asked. “She has my face?”

  “You have hers.”

  The River Thief’s eyes narrowed with sudden comprehension. “So…” All six of her hands tightened around their knives.

  Nicodemus dodged just as the neodemon’s right uppermost arm flicked back and then forward. Her throwing dagger passed within an inch of his shoulder as he misspelled the last of censoring texts from his mind. The River Thief leapt forward with a three-arm knife thrust. Nicodemus danced back but not before her lowermost knife cut into his hip.

  “Stop!” Nicodemus cried and pulled a blasting spell from his stomach. He flicked it at the neodemon’s feet with his right hand while using his left to cast a shielding spell on the deck before him.

  A wall of protective indigo words shot up to Nicodemus’s waist. The River Thief lunged again, this time leading with the kris in her mid-left hand. But Nicodemus ducked below his shielding spell just as his blasting spell detonated. A shockwave momentarily knocked every thought from Nicodemus’s mind and set his ears ringing.

  In the next instant, he found himself staggering to his feet. Two sailors were charging, knives raised. “Rory!” Nicodemus called as he reached to his hip and pulled free a coruscation of paragraphs that leapt from his skin to form a two-handed textual sword. “Rory, now!”

  To Nicodemus’s relief and horror, the deck before the charging sailors exploded into an array of razor-thin spikes each five or six feet in length. The giant splinters punched straight into the sailors’ legs and bellies.

  The night erupted into screams. Nicodemus looked around and saw that every one of the River Thief’s sailors had been similarly impaled by a nightmare blossoming of splinters.

  A booming crash turned Nicodemus’s eyes starboard. His blasting text had knocked the River Thief into the gunnel; there, Rory had made the wood come alive with spikes, one or two of which had pierced the neodemon’s side but most had broken harmlessly. Large barklike growths had emerged from the gunnel to envelop three of the neodemon’s arms. But the blue-green aura surrounding the River Thief ignited into flames and burned her restraints.

  Suddenly, the barge lurched and Nicodemus nearly lost his balance. A fountain of water erupted from the river behind the neodemon as she tore herself free of the barklike bindings.

  “Goddess,
wait!” Nicodemus yelled. “It doesn’t have to be like this!”

  The neodemon turned toward him. Her eyes burned with a merciless white light. She advanced, more carefully now. The barge shook again and Nicodemus stumbled. The River Thief danced forward, slashing with first her left middle arm then all of her right arms. Nicodemus met the first slash with his textual sword then jumped back to avoid the other blades. With a yell and downward slash, he severed her right uppermost arm at the elbow.

  Shrieking, the neodemon lurched backward. Nicodemus pressed his attack and knocked free another of her knives. He was about to thrust into her gut when she jumped away and fell. A roar of thrashing water erupted from somewhere behind Nicodemus. The barge lurched again.

  “Goddess, yield! It doesn’t have to be like this!” Nicodemus yelled again.

  “There’s no safe place!” She raised two of her hands in clenched fists and suddenly the deck bucked. Nicodemus fell forward.

  “The hull’s cracking!” yelled a muffled voice that Nicodemus recognized as Rory’s. He glimpsed the druid’s white robes as the man pulled himself up from the hatch. “Nico, she’s using her godspell to batter the ship. If we go under, we all die!”

  The River Goddess hissed. With one of her arms she grabbed Nicodemus’s foot and with the other she started to drive a dirk into his calf. But where she touched him, the blue-green fire of her aura vanished as his cacography misspelled her godspell.

  She shrieked and pulled her hand back. Her knife had not sunk more than an inch into Nicodemus’s calf.

  Nicodemus had lost the sword text, but he was close enough now that it did not matter. He lurched forward and caught one of the River Thief’s wrists. Her cyan aura winked out where he touched and she screamed.

  “Goddess, you have to yield!” Again the boat heaved. Nicodemus and the neodemon slid across a deck to slam into the gunnel.

  “We’re taking on water!” Rory yelled.

  “Goddess!” Nicodemus yelled. “Yield!”

  “I cannot,” the River Thief gasped while trying to free her arm from Nicodemus’s grasp. With two of her other arms, she grabbed the top of the gunnel.

  “Don’t let her into the water!” Rory cried just as the neodemon shrieked, “Let me go!”

  “Yield!” Nicodemus bellowed.

  She continued to struggle, all her arms flailing. Something sharp cut into Nicodemus’s shoulder. “There can be peace no more!” the neodemon yelled. “I see her now. She will end this world!”

  Nicodemus caught another of her hands. Their faces were now inches apart; her blank white eyes stared into his green ones. “Peace no more,” she whispered, and then, instead of trying to escape, she wrapped all her arms and her legs around Nicodemus. The air around them crackled as his cacography misspelled her.

  “Wait,” Nicodemus cried. “Wait, you—” He needed to know why she was wearing his daughter’s face and if she truly was a demon of the Ancient Continent. But the River Thief grasped him tighter. In a blaze of blue and green scintilla, she dissolved into light and air.

  Nicodemus found himself lying in darkness, bleeding onto the deck.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Francesca DeVega watched the sailors race about the deck and swarm over the rigging. To the east, dawn limned the Ixonian headlands with sunlight. The new day was dappled with seaborne clouds.

  The sight made Francesca’s chest tighten, a familiar sensation since leaving Starfall Island a month ago. The news she was bringing Nicodemus could not be trusted to a messenger or colaboris spell, so she had been forced to leave the Dralish pantheon to the chaos it called self-governance. If the Council had been successful, warships were even now sailing toward Chandralu. Compounding Francesca’s political worries was the anticipation of reunion with her husband and daughter. So, a lovely jaunt through the tropics this would not be. Pity. She could use one.

  Last night Francesca had woken in her cabin with the knowledge that an unknown sea deity was circling below their ship. It was a strong divine presence; one that made Francesca’s textual mind flare into prophetic calculation. As had happened only briefly since her confrontation with Typhon thirty years ago, Francesca had perceived the future as a landscape into which she was traveling.

  It had been a fleeting glimpse, and she had gained only three insights. First, the deity swimming below her might, in the coming days, kill her. Second, most of her futures and the sea deity’s futures intersected at Chandralu’s infirmary. How, she couldn’t say. And third, the coming events in Chandralu had the potential for vast and permanent consequences in all six human kingdoms.

  This last insight was a confirmation of what she had already suspected, the news she was bringing to Nicodemus being what it was. She prayed again to the Creator that the Council had been successful and that the forces of Dral and Lorn had been marshaled and dispatched to Ixos.

  After sensing the sea deity, Francesca had risen from her bunk, unintentionally waking her student and cabin mate. She had hurried on deck to peer down into the starlit waters in hopes of spotting her future opponent. A kraken god perhaps? A whale goddess? Some divinity complex of human and marine animal? She wanted to glimpse at least some part of it. Maybe just a tentacle? But the divinity circled the boat only once more and swam with shocking speed north toward Chandralu.

  Her student, the physician Ellen D’Valin, had followed her on deck and was soon joined by the twin druids, Tam and Kenna, both of Thorntree. Ellen had worn the haggard but alert expression of a physician called from her bed. The twin druids—their pale faces always so similar—blinked in the lingering confusion of sleep. The four of them comprised the entirety of Francesca’s party—the smallest she had traveled with in years.

  If Francesca had better control over her ability to transform into a dragon, she would have left them all behind and flown to Chandralu. But her incarnations were what they were, and so she had been forced to suffer another sea voyage. At least that had the advantage of keeping her in good company.

  She had tried to send her party back to bed, but after hearing about the sea deity circling below, they insisted on staying with her.

  She wondered what, exactly, they thought they could do for a dragon that she could not do for herself. For surely an attacking sea deity would induce her draconic incarnation. But there was no use pointing this out to her followers as it would only make them feel small and insignificant. Then, the next time she tried to send them out on a small and insignificant task, they would object on the grounds of smallness and insignificance.

  Many years ago, remaining quiet had been a perennial problem for Francesca, but years of leadership had taught her the importance of shutting up. Well, mostly they had. Mostly.

  So Francesca had stood with her party until the ship’s bell had rung and the watch changed. She perceived the bell’s sound as a lovely vivid red cloud to her right that faded into a quieter, quavering scintilla and then dissolved into silence.

  Thirty-four years ago, when she and Nicodemus had been embroiled in the demon Typhon’s usurpation of Avel, a half-dragon named the Savanna Walker had attacked her and permanently restructured her mind. The Savanna Walker was in fact the distorted remains of an ancient cacographer named James Berr. His touch had caused her ears to report their sensation to the part of her mind that perceived vision.

  Initially this synesthetic perception of sound had made Francesca effectively deaf. But over time she had adapted to the peculiarities of her mind, learned to interpret sound as vision. Words were recognizable by their geometry and color, individual voices by their particular hues and shapes. Music, initially overwhelming almost hallucinogenic, had become a stream of color and light through time—sometimes pulsatile, sometimes free flowing—which was entirely indescribable to those with typical hearing. As a result, her tastes in poetry and song changed away from classical structure toward the novel and spontaneous. It had taken her decades, but Francesca had transformed what had been a debilitating difference into a unique w
ay of apprehending and appreciating the universe.

  Presently, Francesca’s adaptation to her synesthetic hearing had become so expert that she experienced no anxiety about interpreting sound or communicating.

  So after perceiving the ship’s vivid red bell toll, Francesca had tried to keep her party out of the sailor’s way. But when the first mate invited them to return to their cabins with less than perfect politeness, Francesca finally convinced the young people to sleep while they could.

  They had left her alone with the night sky to think about the sea deity. That it had been subtle enough to hide its identity suggested it was not some newly incarnated neodemon. But no legitimate member of the Ixonian pantheon would have come so close without declaring itself. The realization had darkened her mood and left her grimacing into the wind.

  Francesca contemplated how quickly the world was changing. Less than fifty years ago, all the magical societies from wizards to pyromancers were still meeting in convocations to ensure that no magical society would, at least overtly, participate in the wars between kingdoms. Now the empire openly filled its ranks with the hierophants, pyromancers, shamans, and the wizards of Astrophell. Meanwhile, the wizards of Starfall Keep, the druids, and the highsmiths were committed to fighting in any conflict that threatened a league kingdom.

  These reflections further darkened Francesca’s mood until the sun crested the eastern headlands. Then the tropical wind blew just cool enough to be pleasant. After a month of rolling decks and salt beef and hardtack, there was the promise of solid land underfoot and Ixonian curry in the belly. It was enough to lift her mood.

  She turned toward the sunrise and felt the wind tossing her long brown hair. She looked north and saw the Cerulean Strait—a narrow stretch of water between the Chandralu peninsula and the northern headlands that connected the ocean with the Bay of Standing Islands. She could not yet make out any of the famous limestone islands as they were found only in the bay’s eastern waters.