“Rosie?” Leandra said loudly. The elderly woman blinked then looked up at Leandra. It was hard to believe that this skeletal face was the same that had given her the vivid smiles and the reprimanding frowns of a childhood nurse.
“Lady Francesca,” Rosyln said. “You’ve come to visit.”
“It’s Leandra, Rosie,” she said loudly. “Not Francesca.”
“What?” Her watery blue eyes were searching Leandra’s face.
“I’m your little Lea, Rosie,” Leandra nearly shouted. “I’ve played a trick on you and grew up.”
“You did?”
“I did.” Leandra had forgotten how hard it was to continue talking this loudly.
“Why … so you did. That’s wonderful. How old are you, dear?”
“Thirty-three.”
“Thirty-three! Sacred Mother Forest! Why that’s wonderful. Everyone said you wouldn’t see fifteen.”
“I always hated doing what others told me.”
“You certainly did. Do you remember when I told you to finish your reading in your room … and you snuck out the window and your father found you with the handsome merchant’s son? Do you remember?”
“I try not to.”
“What?”
“Rosie, they have lunch for you here.” She picked up the plate of curry.
She looked at the food in surprise. “Oh, I’m not hungry.”
Leandra lifted a forkful of rice. “But you’ll have a bite for me, won’t you?”
Roslyn eyed the fork uneasily. “Maybe later. Lea, my dear, are you married?”
“You know I wouldn’t want to torture some poor man by marrying him.”
Roselyn chuckled. “No, no. Just waiting for a man that deserves you, and my, but it will take a long string of winters to find him.”
When Leandra was sixteen years old, her mother had somehow talked her into enrolling in the academy of Port Mercy, where she had started a physician’s training. Well, one might call it “training,” if skipping her lectures and shirking infirmary duty could be called training. Nevertheless, in those two years, Leandra had seen enough senility to know that it came in a spectrum ranging from confusion to inconsolable sadness to delirious anger. Though she hated herself just a little bit more for it, Leandra was grateful that time was going to kill Roslyn by flattening her mind into childlike pleasantness rather than by any of its other, crueler methods.
The Creator knew that Leandra’s disease was going to make her own death far more horrible than the one that was sitting before her, blinking rheumy eyes out a sunlit window.
Regardless, Leandra had the answer she had come for; there could be no reason why she should have to murder this old woman whose mind and spirit had all but passed out of this life.
“I love you, Rosie,” she said at normal volume, knowing that the old woman couldn’t hear her. It was a cowardly thing. She should yell it. But instead she kissed the old woman on the cheek and said her goodbyes.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Rory, get back!” Nicodemus bellowed.
Ahead of him, the druid stood above a sheet lunging for his throat. On the other side of the cloth, three young men worked their hands in complex patterns.
Suddenly, Nicodemus understood the ruins of Feather Island. Not a stitch of cloth remained in the village, and the hierophants’ magical language was written upon cloth. The slash wounds on the villagers might come from spell-stiffened cloth rather than steel. The villagers hadn’t been attacked by neodemons; they had been attacked by, “Wind mages!” Nicodemus yelled.
Rory danced back and brought up his quarterstaff. Where druidic wood met hierophantic cloth, white light blazed. Heat burned across Nicodemus’s face and the cloth went slack. Two more strips of cloth billowed up and lunged for the druid.
Nicodemus jumped forward and grabbed one of the cloth spells. Sending a jolt of cacographic force down the sheet, he misspelled the text within. Beyond the sheets, the hierophants yelled. Beside them, the young woman with the book worked her hands more frantically across the pages.
Questions blazed into Nicodemus’s mind. Hierophants were the spellwrights of Spires. They created the empire’s airships and provided their fleets with sails that could generate their own wind. Many hierophants came to Ixos as members of imperial trading missions. But why should they have ransacked and destroyed a poor sea village? It didn’t make any sense.
A strip of white cloth shot across the room and thrust a sharpened point into Nicodemus’s left side. He felt something sharp punch through his leather longvest and into his skin. With a cry he stumbled back and grabbed hold of the eel-like cloth, dispelling it. But apparently the hierophants had learned; this sheet wasn’t connected to the rest of the cloth and so he could not misspell any more of their texts.
Rory let out a war cry. His quarterstaff had elongated and shaped itself into smooth wooden blades. With expert dexterity, he spun the staff around, slashing apart the strips of magical cloth snaking around him. The druid’s lacquered armor had come alive to cover every aspect of his body. The plates about his shoulders had folded around his head and formed a stag’s antlers.
The druid ran into the fray, slashing through cloth and trying to reach the hierophants.
“Rory, fall back!” Nicodemus shouted. “Wait for the others!” Nicodemus took another step toward the door, but then remembered that not all of the villagers had suffered cutting wounds. Most of them had been burned.
Nicodemus looked at the woman flipping through the large book. If the others were imperial hierophants, than she might just be an imperial “Pyromancer!” Nicodemus yelled just as the woman reached into a page and pulled back an arc of dazzling white light.
Nicodemus sprinted out of the room. Behind him, he caught a glimpse of Rory rewriting his staff and armor into liquid wood that formed a blast shield. Nicodemus threw himself onto the boardwalk, landing painfully on one side. He had just enough time to grab one of the boards before the shockwave hit. A brain-rattling force jolted through him. Scalding heat ran along his exposed arms.
Nicodemus opened his eyes, half expecting to find that the blast had knocked him off the walkway to his death on the rocks below. But, thank the Creator, he saw his raw knuckles still tightened around the boards. To his right, he could see that the boardwalk had been scorched by the heat, a small flame dancing from the wood.
“Rory?” Nicodemus yelled. He rolled over, tried to stand, and to his nearly overpowering relief, found Doria and Sir Claude standing above him. Both were breathing hard from the run.
“It’s the empire!” he croaked. “Three hierophants and a pyromancer. I don’t know how much text they have left. Rory’s in there.”
Sir Claude stepped forward. “Rory?”
Doria caught his shoulder. “Wait!” she barked with undeniable authority as she unslung the water skin from her back. She tossed the water skin through the doorway from which the flames had come. A moment later there was a loud pop and then a fine mist rolled out of the doorway. These droplets would contain potent amounts of the hydromancer’s disspells. There were few spellwrights better able to neutralize hostile text than hydromancers. In a moment the mist fell. “Now, Sir Claude!” Doria yelled and gave the knight a shove.
Swords of fluid metal grew from both of the knight’s hands as he charged into the room.
“We need one of them alive,” Nicodemus said. “At least one for questioning.”
Doria pulled a vial filled with rusty red liquid from her bandoleer and made for the doorway. There was another bang. Shouting. Carefully, Nicodemus struggled to his feet. Inside he found Rory on his knees, alive and trying to regain his feet. One the hierophants lay next to him, impaled by what seemed to be Rory’s quarterstaff made into a spear.
Sir Claude hacked a serpentine cloth in half. The cloth whipped around, slashing into his chest but made only a dull clang against his armor.
Doria kicked the spellbook out of the pyromancer’s hands and then spiked a glass vial
on the floor beneath the woman. The pyromancer staggered backward. With another vial, Doria splashed some colorless liquid into her face.
Suddenly wind buffeted through the room and sent Nicodemus’s long hair flying. An expansive sheet billowed up and flew toward the door. Ropes extended from the cloth to form a harness around one of the hierophants. “He’s escaping on a lofting kite!” Nicodemus yelled, as a blast of wind knocked him over.
Sir Claude leapt forward with a backhand slash but missed as the hierophant shot away. His lofting kite hit the door with a thump. Nicodemus’s ears popped. Then the lofting kite was through and pulling the wind mage up into the sky. Sir Claude threw something that glinted metallic in the sunlight before it struck the fleeing wind mage in the calf. The hierophant rose up and out of sight.
Nicodemus scrambled to his feet and ran to the door. The hierophant was flying over bay water, gaining altitude and flying north. A moment later he passed over a standing island and out of view. “Fiery heaven!” Nicodemus swore. “Now whoever sent those wind mages will know we’re on to them.”
He turned back to the room. Rory was on his knees, holding his head. His wooden plate armor had fallen off. Meanwhile, Doria and Sir Claude were facing the pyromancer. She had backed against the wall, stumbling as if drunk. A few gouts of flame leapt from her hands as she extemporized sentences of the pyromancer’s incendiary language.
Sir Claude was pointing his two swords at her. But Doria held both her empty hands up. “Peace, Magistra,” she said. “Peace. There’s nothing you can do now except get yourself hurt. I cast a hydromantic spell onto you when I dashed that water into your face. You’re feeling a bit funny now. You’re going to go to sleep soon.”
For the first time, Nicodemus got a good look at the pyromancer. She had dark olive skin and long black hair. Her brown eyes were full of hatred and her lips pulled back in a sneer. She stumbled and steadied herself against the wall. Her head swung around and she seemed to focus on Nicodemus. Her eyes narrowed as if in recognition.
Nicodemus held his hands up to show that he had no weapon.
“Peace, Magistra,” Doria said again. “It’s over.”
The young pyromancer screamed and charged at Nicodemus. At first he stood his ground, thinking to block her exit. But the moment before she reached him, Nicodemus realized that if their skin touched, the resulting canker curse would kill her in a matter of hours. So much for questioning her then. Clumsily he jumped out of the way, stumbled, fell on his back.
In the next instant she was on him. Tiny flames danced along her knuckles as she punched him in the cheek. Suddenly, metal-clad arms wrapped around the pyromancer and pulled her off of Nicodemus. “Her hand!” he said. “Doria, where she hit me. The canker curse.”
He struggled to his feet and saw that Sir Claude had the pyromancer pinned to the floor. Her eyes were fluttering and she struggled weakly, clearly altered by whatever spell Doria had cast into her face. Meanwhile Doria was examining her hand. Three black tumors already grew from the woman’s knuckles. The dark tissue spread down her fingers and onto the back of her hand.
“This hand comes off right now,” Doria commanded. “Rory, pin her down. Sir Claude, you’ll amputate.”
The druid took the knight’s place holding the pyromancer down. Sir Claude hurried to stand behind Doria.
“She has only moments before this canker spreads into her blood. Then she’s dead.” She spread the woman’s hand open and pulled hard on her index finger and pinky. “That spell I cast on her mind, she’s as anesthetized as I dare make her. She should also be amnestic. It’s going to hurt like hell, but at least she won’t remember it. I need your blade to be as sharp and as hot as possible. It’s got to be hot enough to cauterize the wound, to burn it, so she won’t bleed out afterward. Can you do this?” She looked up at the knight.
Sir Claude’s helmet had peeled back to reveal his grim expression. Nicodemus understood. Killing a violent enemy was one thing, chopping off a restrained woman’s hand quite another. But with steady hands the knight brought both his swords together. They became liquid, began moving up and down against each other. It created a horrible screeching sound. Within moments the friction and whatever spells the knight was casting in the metal made the blade glow orange.
Doria pulled harder on the pyromancer’s index finger and pinky, stretching the arm taut. “Cut just along the palm. Try to save her thumb.”
She pulled back harder. Sir Claude raised his sword, and Nicodemus fought the urge to look away. With a grunt, Sir Claude brought his sword down. The blade crashed into the floor and Doria fell back onto her bottom. In her lap, smoking slightly and stinking, were all four of the pyromancer’s fingers.
There was a moment of unearthly silence. “Creator,” Nicodemus whispered to himself, “be merciful.”
Then the pyromancer began to scream.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Hating yourself is underestimated,” Francesca said as she, Ellen, and the twins hiked up the Jacaranda Steps.
Returning to Chandralu was a strange experience for Francesca. She had been written from the memories of a physician who had trained in the city’s infirmary three hundred years ago. The resulting clash of her recollections with present realities was making Francesca maudlin and philosophical; that, she supposed, was not a good combination for any woman, but it was especially not so for a semi-draconic one, in whom the two emotions might result not only in pessimistic musings but also in a bodily transformation, much wailing, gnashing of foot-long teeth, and generalized dragon-based chaos among the citizenry.
The party had stepped ashore not half an hour before and had been met by a lesser wizard from Chandralu’s colaboris station. He carried a cyphered message from the Counsel of Starfall to Francesca. She had eagerly pulled several luminous Numinous paragraphs from the envelope. But after translating the magical text, she found nothing encouraging.
The message reported that nothing new had been learned regarding her “recent grave discovery,” which she had come to Chandralu to deliver to Nicodemus. The message went on to explain that the Council had attempted but failed to establish a diplomatic connection with the empress’s court.
Francesca was disappointed, scared, and brooding on what she could have done to avoid the present political situation, hence her present and dangerous self-critical and philosophical mood.
“No one can hate you as much as you can hate yourself because no one knows you as well as you know yourself,” she said to her party. “In fact, loathing of similarities is underestimated in general. Think of all the attention we give to differences. We act as if all prejudice or injustice or war is caused by hating things or people who are different from us. I hate that woman because she wears different clothes. Or we fought that war because they worship different gods. We always say that sort of thing. We pretend that we could enter a golden age of peace if we could learn not to distrust foreign things and people.”
“We couldn’t?” Ellen asked, deadpan. The twins, as usual, were silent.
“No, the distrust of difference isn’t everything,” Francesca continued, warming to her argument. “Who can upset you more than someone who is similar to you?”
“But Magistra, you upset me all the time.”
“Exactly my point. I chose you as a student because you reminded me of myself when I was younger.”
“I find that very upsetting.”
“You see!” Francesca said, playing up her passionate voice against Ellen’s flatness.
“Magistra, I am astounded by your rhetoric.”
“What kind of hatred is worse than self-hatred?”
“Hatred of menstrual cramps?”
“Isn’t that usually a punch line from one of my jokes?”
“That’s why I thought it’d make you laugh. But given your present argument, maybe I should have guessed you’d dislike your own punch lines more than anyone else’s.”
“Well, regardless, isn’t that a form of self
-hatred? Are you not hating your own uterus at that moment?”
“It is such a surprise,” Ellen said in a tone that indicated that it was anything but, “to find that you have turned my attempt at humor into substance for your argument.”
“And in medicine, Ellen, in medicine what disease is worse for a body than a disease perpetrated by one’s own body? Consider how the body’s inflammatory response to infection can cause septic shock? Or how our own tissue can turn against us to become a lethal tumor?”
“Yes, Magistra,” Ellen answered, her tone suddenly soft. “And there is the torment your daughter suffers as the different aspects of her nature attack each other.”
Francesca looked at the younger woman, surprised by her frankness and perspicacity.
Ellen squeezed Francesca’s shoulder. A natural gesture, reassuring for a moment, and then painful, as Francesca realized that Leandra would never have done the same. Francesca’s anger melted into guilt and misery.
“Yes, you’re right,” Francesca said, wondering how she had screwed things up so royally that she was closer to her student than to her daughter.
The party continued up the Jacaranda Steps. On either side of the steps the poor called out for money or prayers, depending on whether they were human or divine. Looking at them rekindled Francesca’s exasperation. It was a good feeling; one that helped her stop thinking about her daughter.
“Another example of my argument,” Francesca said, resuming her impassioned tone. “There never have been so many poor on the Jacaranda Steps. It used to be that anyone half able to work had enough to eat. The regency made arrangements for the sick and destitute. But the past thirty years have produced crowds of poor in every kingdom and they are growing every day. Because of the god mob, more children are surviving infancy, the elderly are living longer. But we haven’t figured out how to care for them. The rich are getting richer, the poor poorer. All in the name of matching our strength to the empire’s.”
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