Spellbreaker

by Blake Charlton

  “Not haze, vog,” Doria said shortly. “You can smell it.”

  Nicodemus sniffed. “Only faintly. But why should there be vog near Feather Island? Lava neodemon?”

  “Lava neodemon.”

  Nicodemus grunted. “This might be interesting.”

  “Which is why, you have to stay—”

  Nicodemus held up his hand.

  “Oh!” Doria said in exasperation. “Fine. Have it your way. But when you’re burning to a crisp…”

  Thankfully, she let her invective die off when she noticed Rory and Sir Claude coming up from belowdecks. The knight was once again covered in his metallolinguistic armor, though he had left his head bare. Rory had strapped brightly lacquered, spell-encrusted wooden plates around his chest, back, arms, legs. The druid also hefted a quarterstaff, as thick as a man’s wrist.

  The two men had taken so long belowdecks preparing that Nicodemus had worried they were exchanging violent words, verbally or magically. But now they stood stiffly side by side. A moment later, John, dressed in his usual wizardly black, joined them.

  “A simple sweep of the village in two teams of two,” Nicodemus said. “Rory and I will search the Near Tower. Sir Claude and Magistra, the Shelf. At the first sign of a neodemon, call for the others. John, you stay aboard and make sure the crew doesn’t lose their nerve and sail off without us. Understand?”

  When everyone nodded, they went over the side and took their seats on a bobbing rowboat. When Sir Claude got in and the weight of his armor made the small craft tip, Rory made the predictably snide remark about the knight being too fat to fight, which led to Sir Claude’s predictably snide suggestion that the druid put on enough weight to threaten something other than a bed of violets, which in turn led to Nicodemus’s predictably firm command for them both to shut, the flaming hells, up.

  In a way, Nicodemus found the squabbling calming; this was normal for the party. Rory and Sir Claude were at their game again. Maybe they hadn’t been as rattled by the sight of those dead children as he had been. He hoped so. They needed to keep their wits about them.

  As a sailor rowed them to Feather Island’s docks, they all fell into an uneasy silence. The wind brought acrid smells: burning wood, something sulfurous like rotten eggs, the far more disturbing odor of cooked meat. As they climbed from the rowboat to the dock, a nearby scrum of seagulls took flight, uncovering a mutilated body. Once the rowboat was empty save for the sailor, he quickly shoved off and began beating back to the barge.

  “Rory,” Nicodemus said while gesturing to the Near Tower. “You have the lead.”

  “Try not to get yourself killed, white robe,” Sir Claude muttered as the metal plates around his shoulders folded into a helmet. “Or we’ll have to find some grandmother gardener to take your place.”

  “What was that?” Rory replied. “I couldn’t hear that over the sound of your gigantic opinion of yourself being crammed into that tiny metal box of unoriginal prose.”

  But rather than respond, the knight only saluted Rory and then Nicodemus. “Shall I take the lead, Magistra?” he asked of Doria with a bow.

  She waved her hand. “Yes, yes.”

  There sounded a loud bang and then screeching chaos of gulls. Nicodemus turned to see a flock of the white birds exploding from a terrace halfway up the Near Tower. For a moment, he thought he could hear a wailing voice. It reminded him of something he had heard elsewhere. Something familiar … But then there came a second bang and a second burst of seagulls exploded from higher up on the tower.

  “I think the boardwalks are collapsing,” Rory said. “The fire’s weakened the wood. I can cast texts into the wood to keep us safe.”

  “I’m not worried so much about the unstable boardwalks, Rory,” Nicodemus answered as they started off down the dock and toward the base of the tower. “I’m worried about what might have made it unstable.”

  Rory stopped and pointed down. Nicodemus followed his finger to see a long fluid run of stone in the layered shapes of wax drippings..

  “Lava flow?” Nicodemus asked.

  “Well it sure doesn’t look like it’s made out of Lornish cheese.”

  They continued to pick their way through the ruined buildings at ground level. Rory took the lead, his quarterstaff leveled in front of him as they entered each new building.

  Nothing moved but the seagulls as they picked at the bodies strewn among the rubble. The dead were men and women, villagers, none of them armed. Most of the dead were burned, but some others had wounds made by blades.

  The stony remains of lava flows ran between and into some houses. Curiously, some buildings had been ransacked while others seemed untouched. Particularly odd was a storehouse filled with casks of rice, wholesome and untouched. In one small house, they found a man dangling from the rafters by a noose. “The madness that killed the sailors?” Rory asked.

  “So it seems.” Over the years Nicodemus had seen many destroyed villages. He had learned how to interpret ruins. Towns sacked by humans left telltale signs of looting: guards killed by blade or arrow, women violated and murdered, houses broken apart in search of anything valuable.

  Villages destroyed by a neodemon might have similar signs, especially in the case of brigand gods, but more often the valuables were untouched. More often strewn across the town would be gruesome findings: evidence of torture, enslavement, sacrifice, or whatever else might satisfy a neodemon’s malicious requisites.

  Rory made a thoughtful sound. “Half of it seems to suggest the town was sacked, the other half that some lava neodemon with requisites for horror and insanity tore through the place.”

  “Could be the neodemon drove the villagers mad enough that they started to sack their own houses,” Nicodemus muttered. “Let’s go up a level.”

  Carved into the Near Tower was a spiral staircase that, after a rotation within the stone, opened onto the level above. Just as Nicodemus came out of the staircase, Rory pointed to a plateau ahead of them that was covered by rubble. Something had blasted the limestone above causing a small landslide. Amid the rocks lay a motionless male leg, naked to the hip. The rest of the body was hidden under the rubble. A curved blade had been tucked into the belt, the first weapon they had seen.

  Carefully Rory approached, his quarterstaff out in front of him. Nothing moved and there was no sound but the roar of waves and the squabbling of gulls. Rory jabbed the leg. It remained motionless. Carefully he pressed his palm against the thigh, then shook it. “Cold but not yet stiff.” Dead less than half a day then. Rory pulled the dead man’s knife free of its sheath—a steel blade, the hilt and pommel tapering to teardrop points.

  Nicodemus frowned. “That’s a Spirish knife. Let me see it.” After the druid handed it over, Nicodemus looked the weapon over until there was no doubt left in him. “Perhaps he bought it from a merchant in Chandralu. Perhaps. But I’ve never known a man in a fishing village to carry such a fine weapon.”

  “Nico,” Rory said in a tone that made the other man look up.

  Rory was pointing toward a mark on the man’s hip. Nicodemus leaned closer to see that it was a tattoo, a circle contained within a square. It looked like a diagram from a mathematics text. “What is it?”

  Rory shook his head. “I’ve never seen—” the druid’s words were cut off by a crash from somewhere above them. The floorboards shook, and for a moment Nicodemus again thought he could hear a wailing that was strangely familiar. But then came the crying of gulls and he decided he had imagined the human voice.

  Rory was on his feet, pressing his hand against a wooden beam that supported the boardwalk above them. “Something is moving two levels up and to the west.”

  Nicodemus felt a faint heat move across his cheeks. This was his synesthetic reaction, how his body sensed unknown magical language moving near him. “Anything else you can learn through your wood spells?”

  The druid shook his head. “Not without giving away our presence, and we might want the advantage of surprise, no
?”

  “Advantage of surprise, yes,” Nicodemus muttered and looked out at the houses on the village’s shelf. Doria and Sir Claude happened to be standing before a ruined building looking at something above Nicodemus. Perhaps whatever had caused the bang? Nicodemus waved his arm and was relieved to see Doria look at him. He motioned for them to come to him and then pointed up to where the mysterious thing was. Doria nodded, and the two of them began to trot toward the tower.

  “Whatever it is, it’s moving,” Rory said. “It’s farther around the tower now. I think it saw Sir Claude and Magistra coming.”

  “Can you tell if there’s a way out of the tower over there?”

  The druid screwed his eyes together. “I think … yes … I think so.”

  “We can’t chance it getting away. Come on. We go after it and hope Doria and Claude reach us in time.” He headed back toward the spiral staircase but then stopped for Rory to pass him. “Take the lead. If you can, get it into someplace dark and I’ll do the rest.”

  The druid ran forward and up the spiral steps. Around and around they went and came out onto a boardwalk that was twenty or thirty feet above the island’s shelf. To their right, the walkway wrapped around the island to run into a covered tunnel. To the left the boardwalk had been burned into blacked stumps that stuck out of the limestone, leaving a gap of about ten feet of airy nothing before the walkway resumed its course and met up with the remaining rope bridge that connected with the Far Tower. “This way!” Rory pointed.

  “I was afraid you were going to say that.” Nicodemus said eying the gap.

  “Not a problem.” Rory thumped the bottom of his quarterstaff against the nearest of the burned stumps. Blue light shone from the burnt stump and then it grew a shoot of tender green wood which unfolded broad oak leaves. An instant later, the wood grew straight out from the stump to form a branch as thick as a man’s thumb. Roots spread from the new growth to form identical branches from the charred stump two spaces over. On and on the roots went, until the row of thin branches reached the far edge of the walkway.

  Nicodemus peered through the thin branches to the sharp rocks far below. Rory picked up his staff and quickstepped over them as easily as if he were hurrying across a creek.

  Muttering about having to look foolish in his last moments before death, Nicodemus took a deep breath and quickstepped across the gap, slipping only at the end when Rory caught his sleeve.

  “That was—” Rory started to say.

  “Don’t compliment me,” Nicodemus grumbled. “And why under heaven are you holding my arm? If you had touched my skin, you’d have canker curses floating through your blood right now.”

  The druid looked down at his hand where it was locked around Nicodemus’s wrist and then let go.

  They continued along the boardwalk, peering into the dwellings that had been cut into the rock. Mostly they found the same horrors as they had on the lower levels: villagers killed, some of the dwellings looted, some relatively untouched. It made no sense, and something else about the village was bothering Nicodemus. The sensation struck him most strongly when he was looking at a sleeping cot that had no sheets or mosquito net. He was trying to remember if mosquito nets were needed in sea villages when, from the next room over, there sounded a choked cry and a thunderclap loud enough to leave Nicodemus’s ears ringing.

  Rory rushed out onto the boardwalk and then, raising his quarterstaff, into the next dwelling. Nicodemus followed after. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dimness; he had thought that when they did, he would be staring at a sadistic lava neodemon casting spells to drive them both insane.

  Instead, and to his complete incomprehension, he discovered three young men, all dressed in drab lungi and standing over a large spread of cloth. They were working their hands frantically. Toward one end the sheets were bloodstained. Just beyond this lay a villager’s burnt corpse.

  On the other side of the sheet, a young woman squatted. Her left arm was filled with a wide codex and her right arm moved frantically upon the pages.

  Suddenly things clicked into place for Nicodemus. “Rory!” he blurted. “Get back! The town wasn’t attacked by a neodemon.”

  Rory looked at him in confusion and had just enough time to say “It wasn’t?” before the sheet below him leapt up and, with an edge as sharp as any razor, lunged for his throat.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In Chandralu, the definitive metric of civic power was the compound. Guilds, temples, powerful families, merchant cartels, the army, the navy, the judiciary, or any other organization desiring legitimacy had to maintain a compound to conduct daily affairs and house those pledged to its success. Only the poorest families maintained independent households.

  The heart of any compound was its pavilion—a round central building containing a shrine to the Trimuril and abutting smaller, usually residential, buildings.

  The humblest compounds consisted of a single-story pavilion and a lone house. Larger compounds included multistory pavilions and labyrinthine buildings that spanned several terraces and boasted lily gardens, small orchards, private bathing pools of blue crater water. The grandest compounds had their own carpenters, blacksmiths, weavers, and even small markets.

  The Sacred Regent had granted Leandra a modest compound in the outer Utrana district. A two-story pavilion connected to residential buildings spanning two terraces.

  When a still grumbling Leandra led Dhrun and Holokai up to her compound’s only gatehouse on Utrana Way, she found a single guard was sitting just inside the iron bars. The other servants called him Old Mykos even though he wasn’t much over forty and still possessed a full head of shaggy black hair and the muscular thick arms of the wrestler he had once been.

  “Did you keep the place safe while I was gone, Mykos?” Leandra asked as the guard unlocked the gate.

  Shrugging, Mykos pressed his palms together and then split them apart—a common Cloud Culture gesture to lament the world’s shortcomings. “What can I say, my Lady Warden, the compound was beset by a troop of monkeys. It was left to poor Old Mykos to fight them off. You’d think the other guards would have helped…” Another shrug. “What can you do?”

  Leandra smiled as she walked through the guardhouse into the pavilion. “However did you fight them off?”

  “I threatened to go get my wife.”

  “Harsh.”

  “Ten of them dropped dead of fright,” Mykos said as he followed the party. “Shall I inform Vhivek that you are returned?” As chamberlain, Vhivek—an exceedingly polite old Lotus man—supervised the compound’s daily operation.

  “Please don’t or Vhivek will try to serve me some extravagant meal,” Leandra said. “We won’t be staying long. Oh, and Mykos, have my lord father or my lady mother arrived?”

  The guard raised a bushy eyebrow. “No and no. I did not know we were expecting the Lady Warden of Dral.”

  “It seems that we are, joyously. Do you know if Roslyn is in the compound?”

  “Yes, my lady. Where else would the dear be?”

  “Thank you, Mykos. Please don’t admit anyone while I am in the compound.”

  He nodded and turned back to the gatehouse.

  Though not grand, Leandra’s pavilion was a pleasant space. Twenty feet above, an unadorned dome opened at regular intervals to form skylights that let rectangular beams of sunlight stream down among wooden pillars. A walkway made a circuit around the second story and provided access to the various houses connected to the pavilion. In the center of the pavilion’s ground floor lay a small reflecting pool. Behind it stood a stylized painting of a red lotus below a bulging white cloud, both limned with gold leaf. Here was the obligatory shrine to the Trimuril, the high divinity complex of the Kingdom of Ixos. It was also a representation of the Trinity Mandate: the oldest and most fundamental law of Ixos, which required every official building and endeavor to have a representation—and ideally a representative—of all three cultures.

  Tradition required a p
rayer to the Trimuril after returning from a sea journey. However, given her recent disease flare, Leandra excused herself. “Kai, you may go to the kitchens, but don’t gorge yourself,” Leandra said while mounting the wooden stairway that spiraled around the pavilion walls and led up to the second story.

  Wordlessly Holokai headed off toward the kitchen, his expression one of pained concentration. “And don’t pester the cooks!” she called after him.

  “May I visit the arena?” Dhrun asked from her side.

  “Only if you can be back in half an hour,” Leandra answered more sharply than she intended. They had reached the top of the stairs and were making their way around the walkway, the beams groaning under the divinity complex’s considerable weight.

  Dhrun did not answer, but Leandra would have bet her last rupee that he was making his infuriatingly half smile that might signify obedient contentment or silently amused judgment.

  “Wait here,” she said and turned down a hallway and then climbed another flight of stairs to a building that stood on the terrace above. She stopped at the last door on the right. After a deep breath, Leandra took down her headdress, pushed the door open, and stepped into a small but bright room. There was a small four-poster bed in one corner, draped with a thin mosquito net. A wide window opened east, looking out at the bright city descending to the azure bay. A cloud was passing overhead putting the Lower Banyan Districts into shadow. A few drops of rain landed on the windowsill.

  Before the window, wrapped in a shawl despite the tropical heat, was thin Roslyn. A small table stood beside her chair, a plate of mostly untouched rice and curry sitting upon it.

  “Rosie?” Leandra asked.

  Roslyn of the Amber Wood blinked. She had always been a small woman, barely over five feet and as slender as a young palm. But age had stooped her a few inches and stolen away pounds she could barely afford to lose.