Spellbreaker

by Blake Charlton

  It was the capriciousness of the universe that angered Leandra. That some were born able to become spellwrights, others born poor, and others—like her—born to suffer lifelong disease. The unfairness of it all boiled in her like childish rage.

  As she eyed the grubby crowd, Leandra tried to push down her anger and focus. Getting past the lower steps could be difficult. Among the poor would be some of the miserable deities: gods and goddesses who had been abandoned by their devotees or who had suffered injury or deprivation at the hands of other deities or powerful humans. Often these destitute divinities fused into large complexes to pool their meager strengths.

  In fact, as Leandra picked her way through the crowds, she glimpsed the eight-armed, many-headed Baruvalman, sometimes called Baru. A sallow aura shone around him.

  Leandra’s heart sank. Baru was a complex of so many pitiful divinities that his speech was often nonsensical and his actions—driven by so many different requisites—often led him into danger. But somehow, most likely through bribery, Baru had managed to place an ark stone in the Floating City and become an official member of the Ixonian pantheon and therefore was entitled to Leandra’s protection.

  Of the several interactions Leandra had had with Baru, all had been unpleasant and one had been disastrous. Presently Baru was doing the only thing most miserable deities could do, beg for prayers.

  “Walk fast,” Leandra said while glancing over her shoulder at Dhrun and Holokai.

  Holokai eyed the ragged crowd and tightened his grip on his leimako. The shark’s teeth shone opalescent in the sunlight. Dhrun on the other hand was peering up into jacaranda boughs, smiling serenely, almost stupidly, at a blue-feathered songbird that was making a chortling song not dissimilar to the gamelan music.

  Dhrun and Holokai, quite the pair Leandra had found. She began to march up the steps trying to keep her eyes on the step in front of her. When passing Baruvalman she adjusted her headdress to hide her face. But just as she feared, the pitiful deity began calling louder.

  “Blessed is the Halcyon, who will protect us from the demons crossing the ocean!” Baru said in a resonant male voice. “Blessed is his daughter,” he called, this time a shrill child’s voice, “who protects the humblest citizens of Chandralu from the neodemons.” His voice was now that of a quavering old crone’s. “Blessed is that bane of neodemons, that maker of circles. Blessed is that generous, that pious, that virtuous woman!”

  Well, Leandra thought, at least I know he isn’t talking about me.

  She walked faster, but from the corner of her eye she saw the pitiful divinity complex was struggling to his feet. He was naked as usual, his flabby body androgynous. One of his eight arms had been amputated below the elbow and his sallow aura sputtered. That was new and troubling. His head was an ever-rotating cylinder from which projected the faces of his most dominant incarnations. Presently, he was looking at Leandra with the face of an old woman, but she could also see the head of a praying mantis, a child, a scarred warrior.

  “And more blessed by the Creator would be the Warden of Ixos if she prayed, ever so briefly, to the humblest of deities, to the deity who knows the city!” he said in the buzzing voice of the praying mantis.

  Holokai stepped toward the pitiful complex, who shambled back, two of his hands brought up to shield his rotating face, two pressed palms together in supplication.

  “My apologies, Baru,” Leandra said while marching faster up the steps, “we are on urgent business.”

  “Of course, of course,” Baru said from a child’s face. The effect was eerie. “Of course such a mighty woman, a maker of circles could not spare any consideration for the humble Baruvalman. She bears on her shoulders the weight of all society … and undivided society.”

  Leandra turned to look at the divinity complex, who was now on his knees, all possible hands pressed together in supplication. Leandra spoke with a lowered voice. “Baru, my time is short. What is your meaning?”

  He bowed. “Oh, nothing, nothing. If only I could assist the mighty lady, for surely she shall be called upon to investigate last night’s unfortunate violence on Cowry Street. And surely, she will want to know about how all the humblest denizens of the city, divine and human, are living in fear.”

  “Baru, what do you know of what happened last night?”

  “The simple Baruvalman wishes he could help the great circle maker, but he is so weak. There are so few prayerful in this city. If only he had enough prayers to look after the starving children and the disabled old men.”

  More like opium addicts and petty thugs, Leandra thought; there were already official patron deities for both destitute children and elderly.

  “Tell me something useful,” Leandra said, “and I will have one of my servants pray for you tonight.” She would have prayed herself, but doing so might worsen her disease flare.

  “Oh, Baruvalman wishes he could, honored warden, honored circle maker. But he is so weak … so weak…” he bowed his head, now that of a crone, and pressed it to the step.

  Leandra grimaced. “Get up. Why are you calling me a circle maker? And what are you alluding to? Are people talking about the Cult of the Undivided Society again?”

  “So weak … so weak…” Baru muttered and bumped his forehead against the stone step.

  Leandra sighed. “What requisite must I pray for?”

  Baru sat up and spoke in a rush. “For the making better of the discomfort of the poor, sickly, and constantly itching in the lower eastern docks, second terrace.”

  Leandra sighed. Baru had to make the prayer so specific to ensure that an ark stone would not divert it to another deity with requisites better suited to the resolution of the prayer.

  Leandra supposed that it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if one miserable soul received succor, no matter how small, from Baru. So she pressed her palms together and brought them to her forehead, in the style of the Lotus Culture, and she prayed for what she had been asked for.

  She felt a fraction of the strength in her muscles being converted into divine text by one of the city’s ark stones. That prayer would now sit in that ark until a deity satisfied its requisite, at which point it would be distributed to that deity.

  When Leandra looked, she saw Baruvalman scrabbling away from her; no doubt making for a known beggar in the lower eastern docks who had a rash Baru could scratch and so gain the prayer.

  “Kai,” Leandra said, “please remind our divine friend here of his promise.” But even as she spoke, Holokai had blocked Baruvalman’s retreat.

  The pitiful divinity complex looked back and up at Leandra, now with the child’s face and an addict’s expression of need. “People say there’s a Lornish neodemon in the Bay of Standing Islands. That is it, isn’t it?”

  “We knew that already.”

  “Some say also that the neodemon is killing off the weaker deities in the city. Other people say it’s the Cult of the Undivided Society, that they are taking divinity complexes apart and feeding them to their new neodemon. But everyone agrees, oh yes, that humble souls like me need to be safe. Someone might snap us up.”

  Leandra thought about this for a moment. For the past ten years there had been wild rumors about the Cult of the Undivided Society trying to instigate the Disjunction or to serve the demons once they crossed the ocean. Normally Leandra would have ignored such nonsense. But last night the smuggler from Trillinon had inquired about the cult. “Any more rumors?” she asked.

  Baru shook a praying mantis head. “Oh no! No, no. Well, yes. There is talk that the Silent Blight is worse in the empire. Crop failures. The rich merchants are very much excited about becoming rich when they—”

  “I’ve heard,” Leandra interrupted. “But, tell me, why did you call me a maker of circles?”

  Baru looked at her with confusion. “Everyone is calling the great lady that. And her father.”

  “No one calls my family that. Are you sure? Or are you just making all this up?”

  “Oh, yes,
great lady. I mean, no, no. I would never make anything up? May humble Baruvalman go now, great lady? I can tell you whatever you like. May he go, humble Baru?”

  Leandra studied him for a moment longer and then nodded to Holokai, who stepped aside. Baruvalman scurried off into a narrow alley between two whitewashed walls.

  “Damned waste,” Leandra grumbled as she turned back up the steps.

  “Hey Lea, you sure that prayer won’t make your flare worse?” Holokai asked beside her. “You said it could do that.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said while pressing her hand to her belly. “Though according to the godspell about my head, I’ll have more belly pain in an hour. And now that I think about it, about an hour ago there were a few future selves who were confused and distressed about something.”

  “Baruvalman always makes me feel confused and distressed,” Dhrun said. He was smiling as if it were amusing.

  They continued up the steps and Leandra adjusted her headwrap. The sun was rising high. Then Leandra glanced back toward the bay, intending to check if her mother’s ship had sailed into view. By chance, she glanced down a muddy alleyway in the Naukaa district. Lines of laundry were hung between two buildings, and the ragged forms of two sleeping beggars were huddled under an eave. But what caught her eye was an image of what Chandralu most precisely meant to her.

  Lying maybe five feet from her, at the opening of the alleyway, was a discarded mango rind. Suddenly Leandra’s ability to perceive the world around her expanded. The mango rind, it was perfectly concave, almost a geometric idealization of curved space. The inner surface retained only shreds of glistening yellow-orange flesh. The lip of the outer skin was a deep green, mottled with black flecks, toward its rim blushing deeply red. Alone, the rind would not have meant much of anything to Leandra. But this rind, she could not help but notice, lay motionless in a small pool of liquid feces.

  It was a trifling detail—a distasteful smudge compared to the bright day, the beautiful city. Most would have ignored it, but Leandra could not look away.

  Spurred on by the godspell around her head, the divine aspects of Leandra’s mind leapt forward. Her body, weakened by her recent prayer, flared into its disease. With her textual mind working so hotly, Leandra’s perception continued to widen.

  Leandra could sense every fiber of her robes, her headdress, the leather of her sandals. Then she sensed Holokai and Dhrun, their every divine sentence.

  Out and out her divine perception stretched. Now it included the buildings around her, the mud in the alley, the mango rind, the shit. Her perception included more and more of the city until the limits of herself began to dissolve.

  Now she not only sensed the city’s whitewashed walls, but felt the hot sunlight shining upon them. Now she not only sensed the distant temple-mountains but also became their cool stone hallways. She became the docks. She was the wooden planks groaning under cargo and foot. She was the stalls up in the Hanging Market filled with bags of dark coffee, plates of ground taro root, tiny piles of sugar, larger piles of salt; pyramids of jackfruit, mountain apples, lychee; folded bolts of silk, arrays of hammered bronze amulets, jade necklaces, cheap baubles.

  In the Water Temple, she was the marigolds on a young bride’s flower necklaces. In the Lower Banyan District, she was a bougainvillea vine trying to swallow a kitchen wall. She was the smoke coming from a cooking fire, the wooden ring of a man striking his wife, the lone brass rupee in a beggar’s bowl. She was a hovel in the Naukaa District, stinking and empty after a cholera outbreak. She was a squat plumeria tree dropping white petals on an old black dog.

  “Lea!”

  She discovered that Holokai was gripping her right arm. She was falling. Her vision dimmed.… Grab his arm.… Hold on.… Dhrun loomed over her, his dark face a mask of concern.

  “You stopped breathing!” Holokai’s voice boomed in her ear. He shook her. “I can’t even look away from you for a second, hey? You start breathing now, okay? No fooling. Start breathing.”

  He slapped her, hard. Everything shifted. Her cheek stung. At last, Leandra’s perception began to consolidate.

  “You start breathing, Lea!” Holokai shouted. “No fooling now!”

  What he was saying … it seemed absurd … until … until …

  He drew his hand back as if to slap her again, but now air rushed out of her lungs.

  “No!” she squeaked between gasps of air. “I’m … breathing…”

  She felt a tangle of emotions: terror, giddiness, a distance from the world as if she were intoxicated. She was clinging to Holokai’s arm, panting.

  They waited.

  When her breathing finally slowed, Holokai asked, “It happen again? You becoming the city?”

  “Yes.”

  “Huh. You know how I could tell? You said that your disease flares make other people near you fluent in the magical languages you’re near, right? Well, this time, I was looking over at four-arms over there”—he nodded at Dhrun—“and I could understand some of his prose. Pretty clever, hey?”

  Leandra only nodded. Suddenly her vision blurred with tears. She stood up straight. She tried to rub the tears from her eyes. She thought of the beautiful things she had been, the disgusting ones: the shit and the wooden ring worn by a man beating his wife. The tears seemed to grow hotter in her eyes. “Creator damn it all, I hate this disgusting city!” she swore even as her heart ached for the beautiful city, her city.

  She kept rubbing at her tears until they stopped. Hopefully this wouldn’t rekindle her disease flare. Hopefully she wouldn’t need to take the stress hormones again.

  Holokai and Dhrun waited until Leandra could stand on her own. “It was that prayer to Baruvalman,” she said, “and this new spell around my head. That’s what tipped me over.”

  Holokai nodded. “Well then, no more tipping, hey?”

  Dhrun gingerly touched her shoulder with his lower right arm.

  “Are we ready to go?” she asked.

  Dhrun answered. “We are, but there is no need to rush to your family compound if it’s going to kill you.”

  “Right,” she said and took a few deep breaths. “Right.” At last she turned toward the Jacaranda Steps. “I’m fine. Let’s go.”

  “Lea, you sure you’re all right?” Holokai whispered, so softly that not even Dhrun could hear it. “If you do that again when I’m not around, that might be the end.”

  “It’s okay,” she said while gingerly feeling her tender belly. “There are worse ways to die. So come on, let’s go find one.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The ghost ship listed. A sailor was rowing Nicodemus from the first barge to the smoldering ship, the bay water blue around them.

  The pilot of the lead barge had seen a column of smoke as their convoy left the Matrunda River and entered the Bay of Standing Islands. The captain had wanted to avoid any trouble, but Nicodemus ordered him to investigate.

  Over the horizon had come a small junk. What was left of her rigging smoldered. Not a stitch of sail remained. Scorch marks raked her bow. No one moved on her deck and not even the loudest of hails raised a soul from belowdecks.

  Nicodemus had sent Doria, Sir Claude, and three armed sailors to investigate. When Doria had shouted for him to follow, he knew they had found something important. The swells were minimal, so Nicodemus made it to the ghost ship’s deck without taking an embarrassing dip into the bay.

  First Nicodemus noticed the bodies. Four men. Or, Nicodemus corrected himself, very likely four men. Two were burnt beyond recognition of sex. The other two wore drab, bloodstained lungi and were sprawled on deck.

  Then Nicodemus noticed the smell. Burnt flesh and … something else … Doria was standing by the mast, frowning at a book in her hands. “There’s a smell like…” he said and paused to sniff. “Maybe like … hot metal maybe … or like sulfur?”

  “It smells like vog,” she said without looking up from her book.

  “Vog?”

  “Pollut
ion from active volcanoes or from lava flows meeting the sea. It can get pretty bad north of the big island and near the active volcanoes on the outer island chain.”

  Nicodemus sniffed again. “But there’s no active volcano near here, is there?”

  “Not for hundreds of miles.”

  “Then why should this boat smell like vog?”

  “I’m not sure, but it’s hardly her most pressing mystery.” She held up the book. “According to the captain’s journal, she’s a merchant sailing out of Feather Island, makes a run to Chandralu once every three days or so. Sometimes she takes commissions to ship cargo to the other sea villages. Three days ago she was in Chandralu. The last entry put her in Feather Island yesterday. There’s no entry about departure. The hold has been half emptied. The ballast is off. She’s tilted back.”

  Nicodemus looked at the bodies. “You think she had to leave her home port in a hurry?”

  Doria clapped the book shut. “I do. Even a half competent crew would have redistributed her cargo. If she was attacked on the water, the pirates would have taken her as prize or sunk her.”

  “So what attacked her in the harbor? Never known raiders to burn someone that badly.” He nodded to one of the blackened bodies. “Not in combat at least. A fire neodemon?”

  “I’d say lava neodemon, given the scent of vog. But given what’s in the cabin, it’s got to be more than your commonplace lava neodemon.”

  “What’s in the cabin?”

  Doria took a deep breath. “There are some things in my life I wish I could unsee and unremember. What is in the cabin, it’s one of those things.”

  “That bad?”

  “That bad.”

  Nicodemus raised his eyebrows. Doria wasn’t one to exaggerate. He followed her aft. The moment he set foot in the cabin he regretted it. Three bodies were huddled in the corner, all badly burned, all of them children. The oldest couldn’t have been more than six.