Spellbreaker

by Blake Charlton

  Decades ago Francesca had been written by the ancient demon Typhon and placed in the city of Avel in an attempt to convert Nicodemus. Together, she and Nico had escaped the demon’s control and defeated him.

  In creating Francesca, Typhon had given her memories of a physician who had studied in the clerical academy in Port Mercy and then practiced in the famous infirmary of Chandralu. As a result, Francesca had a wealth of personal and historical memories of the archipelago.

  It had been a long time since she’d last visited. Ixos was now her daughter’s domain—for better or worse—and her memories of the archipelago and its history had become intermingled with the guilt, longing, and anger that she felt whenever she thought of Leandra.

  In fact, Francesca had lately come to see how well Ixos fit Leandra. For example, the Ixonian histories reported that the ancient Lotus People had built Sukrapor, their first and greatest city, on a wide limestone mantle where the Bay of Standing Islands now stood. Back then, there was no bay, only a narrow estuary where the Matrunda River met the sea. Sukrapor had thrived until the Sea People had ventured out of the inner island chain on voyaging canoes and catamarans. The wars between the two cultures had been savage.

  The fiercest battles had been fought in the estuary; the Sea People’s ancient gods had again and again smashed themselves into the rock mantel below Sukrapor, dissolving limestone from beneath the city into the hundreds of tall standing islands that lined the eastern aspect of the bay.

  The Sea People would have been victorious if the ancient Lotus gods had not made a desperate alliance with the Cloud People of the outer island chain. Though few in number, the Cloud People possessed the earliest form of the hydromancer’s magical language. When the first water temple was built and the nascent order of hydromancers had formed, the balance of power in the archipelago had evened.

  The wars had raged for decades, weakening all combatants, and ended only when the First Neosolar Empire expanded out of Trillinion to subjugate the entire archipelago. Under imperial rule, the Lotus People had retreated up the Matrunda River to build Matrundapor. An age later, when the First Neosolar Empire had crumbled, one deity from each of the archipelago’s cultures had fused themselves together to form the Trimuril, the first divinity complex. United under this deity, the three Ixonian peoples won independence as the kingdom of Ixos and founded Chandralu as their capital.

  However, as was so often the case in history, strife among the cultures had continued. The ancient prejudices remained. Skirmishes and even small wars between Sea and Lotus, Cloud and Sea, Lotus and Cloud continued to the present day.

  Francesca wondered again if this history wasn’t the reason Leandra had chosen to dedicate her short life to the archipelago. The Lotus Culture, the Sea Culture, the Cloud Culture, all composed the body of Ixos. Each was now dependent on the others, and yet periodically at war with one another.

  Ixos, the archipelago, was vibrantly alive and yet at war with itself, just as Leandra’s body was intensely alive and yet at war with itself.

  Thinking of her daughter’s disease felt like a taste of ash to Francesca. She thought of all the patients she had cured. Francesca would have forsaken them all if it had allowed her to cure her daughter. Instead, she had only managed to turn her daughter’s childhood into an endless series of examinations and experiments. During all those years, they had made only one discovery: During a disease flare, high doses of stress hormones could calm her body’s attack on her textual aspects.

  Until this discovery, Francesca had not thought that Leandra would live past her tenth year. Now, even though she took the stress hormones during her disease flares, it did not seem that Leandra would live past forty years, a very young age to die for someone of her heritage. So it was that Leandra was Francesca’s most beautiful creation, her greatest failure.

  Francesca thought about her other mistakes as a mother. At the time, there had seemed to be so little choice. So little choice, especially fourteen years ago in Port Mercy. Perhaps it was that night, that exact night, when she had lost her daughter.

  “Magistra?”

  Francesca turned to see that Ellen had come back up on deck. She was a petite woman, dark skin, deep-set brown eyes, short glossy black hair, wearing a grand wizard’s black robes. It was good to see her. “Ellen, were you able to sleep at all?”

  Ellen stepped beside her. “Slept like the dead, which always makes me happy.”

  “Am I not letting you sleep enough?”

  “No,” Ellen said while looking at the sea. “But since I enjoy sleeping like the dead, I assume it’s evidence that I won’t mind actually being dead.”

  “There’s a cheerful morning greeting for you.”

  Ellen smiled. “I forgot that Magistra is an immortal before she is a physician, so gallows humor will be lost on her.”

  “I’m afraid, my brilliant student, that your humor is lost on almost everyone.”

  “Better to have a lost sense of humor than none at all.”

  Francesca scowled. “You laugh at my jokes.”

  “A junior physician is required to laugh with her senior physicians when they are present. It helps make up for how much she laughs at them in their absence.”

  Francesca looked at her sideways. “You are reminding me why I chose you as my Lornish envoy.”

  “Because you respect my judgment and enjoy my dry wit?”

  “No, because you’re short.”

  “Well, they say brevity is the soul of wit…” Ellen looked over at Francesca’s collarbone and then, exaggeratedly, looked up at her six feet of height. “Oh my, Magistra, I think I may have discovered why you’re not funny.”

  Francesca sighed. “So you don’t have any bright ideas about who that sea deity was either?”

  “None,” Ellen mumbled. The young physician always took failure at any task, even the impossible ones, as a personal insult. Maybe that was why Francesca liked her.

  They stood together and listened to the sailors call to each other. Finally Ellen broke their reverie. “Magistra, you don’t seem that nervous about meeting your daughter.”

  “That’s nice to hear, because I feel like I might puke.”

  “Dragon’s vomit?”

  “Crack another pun and you might make this one do so.”

  “Don’t you think that is mildly hypocritical of you?”

  “There’s nothing mild about my hypocrisy. I too am guilty of puns.”

  “So,” Ellen said and then sighed, “you couldn’t think of a reason why that sea deity showed up either?”

  “Nope.”

  They fell silent again. The sun, now fully up, was illuminating the bright clouds and the dark Ixonian jungles. Through the Cerulean Strait, Francesca could make out the first of the Standing Islands.

  “Magistra, this is apropos of nothing, but given what you’ve told me of your past, can I ask a rather personal question?”

  “If I say ‘no,’ would that stop you from doing so?”

  “Previous experience suggests not.”

  “Better get it over with then.”

  “When we take our news to Lord Nicodemus, do you really think your daughter might try to kill you?”

  “Yes,” Francesca said, “and I wouldn’t blame her.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Leandra was brushing her hair when she heard the rope outside her quarters creak. It made her smile.

  Again she ran her tortoiseshell comb through her hair, glossy raven black like her father’s. Her wrists ached and her stomach still felt uncomfortable, but it seemed her disease flare was cooling despite the rice wine with Dhrun last night.

  Behind her, the floorboards creaked. “Come in, Kai. Close the curtains.”

  “How’d you know it was me?”

  She tapped her temples. “An hour ago, I felt a few of my future selves were experiencing moments of … unsustainable pleasure. The more I thought of returning to my bedroom the more of my future selves began to feel such unsustaina
ble pleasure.”

  “Come on now, you know that sustainable problem only happened to me that one night.” He laughed. “I had an excuse; it was Bright Souls’ Night on Mokumako and my devotees drank too much kava and forgot about my requisites.” His firm hands landed lightly on her back and begin to massage her shoulder muscles.

  She sighed as her muscles unknotted. Mokumako was Holokai’s home island, rimmed by cliffs and covered with jungle and cloud forest. She had met him there years ago, and his cult was still centered on that island.

  “Did you want to talk about any of your requisites in particular?” she asked.

  Holokai’s cult was a throwback to the golden age of the Sea People, when they had raided across the archipelago. His cult believed that, when the Disjunction came, he would defend the island from the demons. His requisites were to destroy any divinity posing a threat to his island. His cult also prayed that Holokai would one day father a demigod who would lead them to glory.

  As a result, particularly in the morning when his worshipers were their most fervent, Holokai developed the powerful desire to sire that demigod. Long ago he and Leandra had discovered that her condition had left her infertile, but she did not mind helping her captain practice for such an important task. In fact, for the past few days he had received an unexpectedly large amount of prayerful energy. He wasn’t sure why his followers had become more devout, but because it made him particularly vigorous during certain actives, he wasn’t questioning it.

  “Is the catamaran ready?” Leandra whispered.

  “You know her captain wouldn’t rest if there was anything more to do for her. I thought there was another lady who might want help getting shipshape.”

  She leaned back against his chest and smiled.

  “You feeling better about the news that your mother might be in the bay?”

  “I wouldn’t say better, but at least I can prepare myself.”

  “You truly haven’t seen her since Port Mercy fourteen years ago?”

  “Truly.”

  “You ever gonna tell me what happened that drove you apart?”

  “Sure, how about just before the seas boil?”

  Holokai stopped massaging her shoulders. “So this thing with prophecy and you needing to kill someone and your mother’s coming into the bay … do you think it has to do with the Disjunction? How bad do you think it is?”

  Leandra rolled her eyes. She’d forgotten how touchy he could get about prophecy. “Not bad enough to interrupt a back massage.”

  He started working his hands again. “Hey, Lea, I’m serious.”

  “I don’t see how this could be connected to the Disjunction. There’s no evidence of demons crossing the ocean. I just caught a glimpse of what’s coming for me.”

  “But the possibility of war between empire and league—”

  “Politics. The empire is cannibalizing deities to become stronger than the league, and the league is pumping out deities to keep up with the empire. Maybe they’ll fight another small war to see who’s got the upper hand lately. Whatever happens, neither civilization is going to give half a damn that they are torturing their own to crush the other one. Our job is to be different. That and stay alive.”

  Holokai grunted agreement. “And about staying alive … is what we’re dealing with like that incident with the mercenary elephant god?”

  “You keep harping on that.”

  “He did crush half the bones in my body.”

  “Do you even have bones when you’re a shark? I thought you were all cartilage.”

  “Not the point. I want to know what we’re facing. How hot is the water we’ve landed in?”

  “In terms of tight scrapes we have been in before?”

  “That’ll do.”

  Leandra considered. Since becoming Warden of Ixos, she had placed herself and her crew in mortal danger only three times. The first was the attempt to take down an elephant mercenary god who had gone neodemon and was trying to pressure the Sacred Regent to let him enter the Trimuril’s divinity complex. Leandra was trying to convert him back into the pantheon when things turned violent. If one of the neodemon’s lieutenants hadn’t gone mad, they never would have escaped.

  Leandra’s second mistake had involved a jellyfish neodemon who had made his bloodthirsty devotees immune to the sting of his twenty-mile-long tentacles, which he wrapped around a fleet of their pirate ships.

  Leandra had attacked with a full squadron and lost two ships and half her crew. She had been forced to flee and survived only because the sea became unusually hazy that evening and they lost their pursuer in the gathering dark. The remains of her squadron had just limped back into harbor. Blessedly, a powerful storm had struck and washed the neodemon onto shore where he died.

  More recently, there had been the discovery of a mosquito goddess on the northern coast of the big island. She had been sucking blood from neighboring villagers and divine language from rival deities. When trying to escape after a failed conversion, Leandra and her party had gotten lost in a mangrove swamp. They heard the mosquito goddess’s swarm filling the air miles away. The neodemon’s insectoid manifestations were truly nightmarish. They had watched her swarm over a man. The bugs covered every inch of exposed skin and wriggled under chain mail. They sucked him dry of blood in moments. Leandra’s party would have suffered the same gruesome fate if a nearby volcano hadn’t erupted and filled the air with smoke that confused the swarm.

  The more she thought about her three failures, the more Leandra realized that she still lived only because luck—the lieutenant’s madness, the sea storm, the volcanic eruption—had averted disaster. But then again, who could claim differently in such a precarious world? Every soul in Chandralu was alive only because fortune had spared them from war, disease, disaster. And, she reminded herself, only three of her expeditions had failed while her successes numbered in the hundreds.

  She looked up at Holokai. “I’d say it’s a dangerous situation we’re in, maybe as bad as that botched conversion of the elephant god, but nowhere near as bad as the jellyfish or the mosquitoes.”

  A bit of the tension went out of his eyes. He didn’t like thinking much for himself. Sharks, as a rule, not being overly thoughtful. “Okay then.”

  She leaned back against his chest. “Now, wasn’t there … something else you were concerned about?”

  He laughed softly as his hands slipped down her back, tracing along her skin, to hang around her waist. Then she could feel his fingers working as they gathered in the cloth of her robes. Slowly, slowly her hemline rose up to her knees. “Maybe one thing.”

  She reached back to press her palm against his hips. “What’s that?”

  Softly he kissed her neck. “You’re sure no one will disturb us?”

  “I gave everyone chores to keep them busy for an hour.”

  He kept gathering in her robes, drawing the hemline up her thighs. “And Dhrun?”

  “Him too.” He began to kiss her neck.

  “You’re sure?”

  His hands stopped working and pressed against her hips. “You worry too much about four-arms. I took care of him.” He turned her and she looked up into his handsome face. His deep brown eyes looked into hers. “I mean it now. You think about him too much.”

  She smiled at him. “Your dimples don’t show when you’re jealous.” She reached up and ran a hand along his cheek. “There’s no need.”

  He pulled her close. “I’m not jealous. But he’s an odd one. He converted himself. What kind of neodemon converts himself?”

  “One who has requisites for glory and can pick a leader to get him there. And we agreed that he never had to talk about his past before conversion.”

  Kai frowned. “He gets out of line. He’s too competitive when the whole crew has to paddle together.”

  “I’ll talk to him—”

  “No, no … We got something more important to worry about now.” He kissed her again, even more gently than before, but she could feel
the almost limitless strength in his arms.

  “Oh?”

  His fingers started working again and slowly drew the hem of her robes up her thighs, over her hips.

  * * *

  Aboard his first barge, Nicodemus watched Rory direct repairs to the barge that the River Thief had tried to steal.

  After Nicodemus had dispelled the neodemon, Rory had edited the druidic text in the ship to keep it afloat. Sir Claude had emerged from his metallic cocoon and—though careful never to touch his patient—treated Nicodemus’s minor wounds.

  As dawn began to hide stars behind vivid sky, the rest of Nicodemus’s party appeared on the river. John had had difficulty rousing Doria from the River Thief’s godspell. It was only with the neodemon’s death, after which her godspells rapidly decayed, that John woke Doria and the rest of the party.

  Rory was barking commands to the pilot of the fourth barge as he and a dozen sailors lashed the two barges together. Rory wanted to transfer some text from one boat to another to complete the repairs. Nicodemus tightened the blanket he had wrapped around his shoulders even though the tropical morning was warm and the coming day promised to be hot.

  “I haven’t blackmailed you yet,” a woman said behind him, “only because I haven’t decided what I want to extort from you.”

  Nicodemus turned to see Magistra Doria Kokalas, his envoy from the hydromancers of Ixos. At one hundred ten years old, Doria was the most senior spellwright in Nicodemus’s court. Born of the Cloud People in Chandralu, Doria had trained first in her native city as a hydromancer then as a clerical physician in Port Mercy.

  Despite her age, Doria stood straight at nearly five feet ten inches and possessed brown eyes that were only just beginning to cloud over. Her long white hair was tied back into a ponytail and she absently bothered the sleeves of her long blue robes.

  Nicodemus smiled. “Magistra, it is good to see you on this fine Ixonian morning.”

  “Don’t change the subject; when I tell your wife about the risks you took attempting to convert a minor neodemon, her head will explode.”