Spellbreaker

by Blake Charlton

  Behind Leandra someone bellowed. She spun around and began fumbling for the knives in her belt, but then she saw that Holokai was standing over a third attacker, a big man dressed in a fine lungi. He lay sprawled out, his mouth working as if he were trying to speak. A ragged wound ran down the man’s left collarbone, his chest, and then opened up into his belly. At the end of the wound lay Holokai’s long-handled leimako, its shark’s teeth glistening with blood.

  “Wait!” Leandra screamed. “We need to question—”

  But Holokai’s eyes had gone black. The skin on his face and belly were white as paper. His arms and back were dark gray. He crouched and with a powerful jump leapt at the man who had been holding the crossbow.

  The would-be assassin turned to run. But Holokai flew nearly eight feet into the air and closed the distance between them in moments. With a vicious overhand slash, he brought the leimako down on the man’s back. When the weapon made contact, the shark’s teeth sprang out, becoming twice their size, digging into the crossbowman.

  “No!” Leandra found herself yelling. “Alive. We need them alive.” But she turned to Dhrun and saw that he had thrown the knifeman to the ground. The thug’s head tilted at an angle that was not possible with an intact spine. “We need … to question them,” she finished lamely.

  Dhrun turned around, looking up and down the street, up to the rooftops. Suddenly Leandra realized with relief that Dhrun had held his human incarnation, the one called Dhrunarman. If he had assumed his most powerful incarnation, the neodemon named Dhrun, there would be potential for massacre. “Keep your incarnation,” Leandra heard herself say stupidly.

  “Of course,” Dhrun growled.

  Meanwhile Holokai was pacing around them both, his overly long face fixed into a rictus, his teeth large and serrated.

  An eerie moment passed, silent save for the slap of sandals on paving stones. Then someone distantly began shouting an alarm.

  Leandra lowered her hands, tried to make herself breathe calmly. She looked around for more attackers but saw none. Foolish though, she realized, for her to expect to see a threat if Dhrun and Holokai had not yet spotted any.

  “Creator damn it!” she swore while looking down at their three assailants. Those that Holokai had sawed in half were filling the street with pools of red. She would have to get Holokai away from them.

  “Who in the God-of-god’s name is that bloody stupid?” Leandra asked with a calmness that belied her racing heart. “How amazingly, incredibly, mind-blisteringly dumb do three humans have to be to attack us?”

  “At least one of them was a spellwright,” Dhrun said beside her. He showed her his upper left forearm, which was stained with blood weeping from a long smooth wound. Thanks to Dhrun’s divinity, the gash was already closing. The would-be assassin had cast some wartext against Dhrun.

  From farther down in the city, shrill whistles began to sound. Leandra heard faint footfalls of running. Someone had alerted the red cloaks, the city watch.

  “Lovely,” Leandra growled. “Just lovely. I’m a quarter mile from home and now we’re going to be interrogated.”

  “There’s no evidence you were here,” Dhrun said. “I can tell the watch it was just me and Captain Crazy Fish.” He nodded over at Holokai, who was still circling.

  “No, someone might have seen us,” Leandra grumbled before raising her voice. “Kai!” He kept circling but turned his black eyes toward her. “Kai! Stop pacing, for pity’s sake, and stand farther away from the blood.” She made a shooing motion.

  Holokai’s face remained as blank as stone, but he made one more circuit around them and then stalked away down the street. The whistles and footfalls grew louder. Leandra turned and saw two men with thin red cloaks and short spears trot up the Jacaranda Steps and toward them.

  “Do we have a story?” Dhrun asked as the red cloaks approached.

  “No, the truth. But let me do the talking,” she said while moving into the shade of a building and undoing her headdress. She hoped one of the red cloaks would recognize her.

  “Sacred ocean, damn it all,” one of the watchmen muttered while looking down at the bodies. “Another one.”

  Both of the red cloaks were lean, lanky men, wearing short lungi under their cloaks of office. The shorter and older of the two had black skin and a beard chased with silver. His face seemed familiar, and Leandra cursed her poor memory for names. A little familiarity could go a long way in situations like this.

  Fortunately he seemed to recognize her. After taking in the three bodies he turned to her and nodded. “My Lady Warden, I am sorry to meet you again like this. Are you hurt?”

  “No … no…” she paused unsure how to address him. Captain of the watch, wasn’t he? She had a vague feeling she had met him when investigating a neodemon of forbidden erotic love who had taken to inducing amnesia in certain young woman and men before others took advantage of them. A truly disgusting business. Leandra hadn’t been at all sorry when she had caught the neodemon and dispelled him into a thousand agonizing pieces.

  But now she needed to remember the captain’s name. Something that started with a K? Damn. She put a hand to her chest as if steadying herself. “No, Captain. I’m not hurt.”

  The silver-bearded watchman turned to Dhrun. “That your changeling wrestler?”

  “He is.”

  “Oh yeah?” The younger man looked at Dhrun with a sudden smile. “Been going to the arena since I was a little fry, with my dad of course. He’d always have us pray for the wrestler that he’d put money on, so I guess that made me a devotee of you back when you was a neodemon, hey?”

  Dhrun pressed his palms together; the upper pair he brought to his forehead, the lower pair he brought to his heart. The most formal of greetings. “It is always a pleasure to meet a devotee of the arena.”

  The younger watchman was grinning like an idiot as he bowed in the style of the Sea People. “Honor’s all mine, my lord. I made a bundle last year when I bet on Dhrunarman. Was overjoyed when he won and joined your divinity complex.” Then he lowered his voice to conspiratorial volume. “Don’t suppose you could give me any divine tips on who’s the smart bet for this year’s championship, hey?”

  The older watchman cleared his throat loudly.

  “Oh, right, Captain Kekoa,” the younger man said. “Sorry, my lord”—this to Dhrun—“investigation and all.” Dhrun nodded as the younger man bent to examine the body at his feet.

  Now Lea remembered: Captain Pika Kekoa, very competent and respected, originally of the Sea Culture, who then disavowed all cultures when he became a captain of the city’s watch and therefore a high priest of Dhamma, the high goddess of law and justice.

  Captain Kekoa was looking at Holokai twenty paces down the street. He was still prowling in circles, but his coloring looked more human. Leandra hoped his eyes and teeth were also. The captain started to ask, “Is that your sh—”

  “Sea god,” Leandra interrupted. “Best not to say what he is. Makes it harder for him to come back to his human incarnation. That’s why I have him pacing away from the meat. His leimako did for those two.” She nodded to the two men who’d been half chewed open by Holokai’s blows. The pool of blood under each body was now growing sticky dark in the tropical sunlight.

  Leandra preemptively offered her story. “My officers and I came in this morning from patrolling the bay. I was returning to my family compound, when we passed that man.” She nodded to the body that the younger watchman was inspecting. “Seems he was a spellwright of some kind. He cast a wartext against Dhrun and came at me with a knife. The other two appeared out of nowhere. One attacked Holokai and the other loosed a crossbow at me.”

  Dhrun held out the bolt.

  “Nice catch,” Captain Kekoa grunted.

  “Captain,” the young watchman said while examining the side of the knife man. “It’s another one.”

  Captain Kekoa stood behind his partner. Whatever he saw there made him swear. “Where are they all comin
g from?”

  Leandra refitted her headdress and went to the captain’s side. By pulling the lungi slightly down, the younger watchman had revealed on the dead man’s hip a tattoo of a circle contained within a square. It looked too exact to have been made by human hands.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Well … I suppose it is safe to tell you, my Lady Warden, since it’s likely it’s you and your officers who are going to have to figure this mess out. But that tattoo is what the street folk are calling the Perfect Circle. Supposedly it’s a symbol of the Cult of the Undivided Society.”

  Leandra snorted. “Rubbish.” Suddenly her stomach tensed. Hadn’t Baruvalman called her a circle maker? “I’ve heard rumors of the Undivided Society for years and never heard of such a tattoo.”

  “Me either,” the captain agreed. “But last night was full of changes. Maybe you heard about that brawl on Cowry Street? That left two bodies on the street, one of them with a Perfect Circle tattoo. Then the nightwatch were kept busy with attacks on minor deities. What I heard was that two miserable deities—one the goddess of a village cleared out by plague last year and another a god of lepers—were killed.”

  “Killed?” Leandra asked.

  “Surprised me too. Dhamma has manifested herself in the city to investigate and doubled the watch. That’s why we could be here so quickly. Reports say the attackers were in groups of three or four, some disguised as beggars, some as red cloaks. There was an attack on the god of the Banyan Districts that failed; he killed two men, both with Perfect Circle tattoos.” The captain nodded toward the corpse at his feet. “Though, if you’re right about this one being a spellwright, that’s a first.”

  The younger watchman had finished examining the man that Dhrun had killed and moved on to the other two bodies.

  “Any idea who they are?” Leandra asked.

  The captain shrugged. “At this point my best guess, crazy as it sounds, would be that the Cult of the Undivided Society is real after all. Maybe they’re tired of waiting for the demons to come across the ocean and decided to raise a little hell of their own.”

  Leandra had to work to keep her expression neutral. Meanwhile, the younger watchmen had collected the weapons of the attackers. “All three have the tattoo,” he reported to the captain. “Nothing special about the weapons. The crossbow’s of a Dralish design, but that’s the most common found on the archipelago. The crossbowman only had three other bolts on him. The knives are steel push daggers, nothing fancy. They could have been forged anywhere in the northern three kingdoms. No coins.”

  “No other weapons? No spellbooks?” Leandra asked.

  “None, my Lady Warden.”

  Leandra thought for a moment. “Lightly armed, so they weren’t expecting much of a fight. In fact, given what you told me, there were four attacks and only two succeeded.”

  “That we know of,” the watchman added.

  Leandra nodded. “Fair enough. But still, attacking my party or the Banyan god with those ticklers”—she nodded to the weapons in the watchman’s hands—“means the attackers don’t know how to size up their targets.”

  “You don’t think it’s the Cult of the Undivided Society?”

  “I don’t think it’s any cult. If a neodemon is subtle enough to keep itself hidden during an attack, it’s subtle enough to avoid attacking any deity who might be a danger to them.”

  “But this isn’t a neodemon attacking,” the younger watchmen said. “It’s the devotees. Devotees who want to bring the true demons across the ocean.”

  “True, devotees can get carried away. But four different attacks across the city, two on poorly chosen targets? The cult would have to be coordinated enough to arm their kill teams but ignorant enough to attack gods far too powerful for them.”

  “So, you think it’s what, an incompetent cult?” the young watchman asked.

  Leandra shook her head. “More likely it’s some organization pretending to be a cult. An organization that doesn’t know much about Ixos or divinities.”

  The captain of the watch frowned. “What sort of organization would be like that?”

  “I don’t know,” Leandra said, though there was a certain Trillinonish smuggler whom she wanted to question on the subject. Come to think of it, she also wanted to ask some questions of that miserable Baruvalman. He had called her a circle maker. Did Baru think she had killed those miserable deities? Not likely. If he had, he should have run from her instead of pestering her. Baru likely knew more than he let on, or knew more than he was aware of.

  Leandra cleared her throat. “Who would want to pretend to be a cult? That would be an excellent mystery for a captain of the watch to solve.”

  Captain Kekoa smiled weakly. “And I’ll be wishing to fish up a whale while I’m at it. But I will tell my goddess of what you said, though I suspect you might be seeing her before I will.”

  “I think I might indeed,” she grumbled while motioning to Dhrun. “Captain, is there anything else you require of me? I have a royal summons I have to attend to, and I now suspect that it might be related to the ill news you have brought me.”

  “No, my Lady Warden. Please pray to Dhamma for justice to find whoever is behind this.” He bowed.

  She and Dhrun returned the gesture and then set off for her family compound. Holokai fell in beside her. She saw with relief that his eyes and teeth were humanoid. His expression was one of pained restraint. This was the trouble with gods of violence: a taste always made them want more.

  “Hungry?” she asked. In truth, she was impressed that he had avoided touching any of the bodies.

  “Enough to eat a whole pig,” he groaned through tensed jaw.

  “Can you wait until your afternoon prayers reach you?”

  “Not if you bring me anywhere near a pig,” Holokai grunted and then began to glare at Dhrun with eyes going all black. “Something amusing, four-arms?”

  Leandra turned to see that Dhrun was looking at the other god with a smirk. “No, Captain Holokai,” he said in a calm tone. His hands were pressed together in supplication at his heart and his belly. “I am impressed that you’re able to suppress such instincts.”

  Holokai brought his leimako up, grasping its long handle with both hands. “You’d be even more impressed if I stopped suppressing the instinct to saw off a few of your extra limbs, insect.”

  “I have never wrestled a fish before,” Dhrun said thoughtfully. “Slippery, I guess you’d be. Might be a challenge, if you can control your tiny fish brain.”

  “What makes you think you can talk back to me, bug? You hiding some reason to think you’re so important?”

  “Kai,” Leandra said in a warning tone.

  The shark god continued. “I mean it, four-arms, what are you hiding? Why did you convert yourself? What were you as a neodemon?”

  The smirk fell from Dhrun’s face. All four of his arms flexed.

  Leandra stepped between them. “Stop it, both of you, and start using the withered organs you call brains.”

  The two gods stared at each other for a long moment. Then, slowly, Dhrun took a step back. “Ten thousand apologies.”

  Holokai showed his serrated teeth for a moment but then looked at Lea and bowed his head.

  The party continued their march in silence save for Leandra’s occasional grumbling about gods of violence and the stupidity of men.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Feather Island smoldered.

  The mile-wide limestone island had been eroded at its southern end creating a shelf of land, which at its extremity erupted into one of two plateaued towers of rock. The tower that stood at the edge of the shelf was called the Near Tower; its twin, which erupted straight from the sea, was known as the Far Tower.

  Nicodemus had visited Feather Island twice before. Then every flat surface had been covered with rectangular whitewashed houses. Into every vertical surface had been carved rooms adorned with boardwalks and palm-thatch awnings. There had been bright hyacinth
flowers and bougainvillea vines. Between the two rock towers, rope bridges had stretched at three different levels.

  But now the houses on the Shelf had been burnt, many to the ground. The charred trail of fire climbed its way up the southern face of the Near Tower. The bottom and top rope bridges dangled in the wind. The middle bridge had somehow remained hanging but had lost some of its support lines. Crowds of gulls were flapping about the docks, red strips hanging from some of their beaks. Nicodemus had a queasy feeling about what the gulls were eating.

  “You have to stay aboard,” Doria grumbled beside him on the barge’s deck. “I realize we don’t have the time to wait until dark. But in this much sunlight, you’re barely even a spellwright.”

  “I am the only one who could naturally disspell whatever godspell the neodemon used to drive the sailors into insanity.”

  “The boys and I have cast enough wards on our minds to keep out anything but the library of Astrophell. If we run into trouble, you’ll hear about it and come ashore.”

  “First thing I’d hear might be your screams as you cut your own throats,” Nicodemus said before giving Doria a level stare. “So thank you for your concern, Magistra, but I will be leading the exploration of Feather Island.”

  Doria was still dressed in her blue hydromancer robes, but she had hung twin bandoleers over her chest to hold several small glass vials. They were filled with liquids ranging in color from rusty red to a nacreous white. Within these vials were the concentrated aqueous spells hydromancers cast to turn plain water into a variety of other extraordinary substances. Doria had also slung a large water skin around one shoulder.

  Nicodemus had changed into tan trousers, a white shirt, a leather longvest. The tropical heat made him sweat, but all the cloth would prevent him from accidently giving one of his friends a canker curse if their skin touched. Nicodemus looked away from the island and out to the horizon. The line where sky met sea wasn’t as sharp as usual. “Does it seem hazier near the island?”