Spellbreaker

by Blake Charlton

  “An autopsy…” Magistra Ubo continued but then looked Dean Sarvna. He, however, kept his eyes on Francesca. So Magistra Ubo continued, “An autopsy revealed … pathology not consistent with any known disease of pregnancy. In fact, the findings support a divinopathophysiology.” This being physician’s jargon for “a divine process that causes disease.”

  “Do they now?” Francesca asked.

  “Describing the findings…” Magistra Ubo struggled to find the words.

  “Perhaps,” Dean Sarvna suggested, “Magistra DeVega would like to see the findings for herself?”

  Francesca looked at the chubby man and discovered, much to her surprise, that she liked him. “Yes, I would. How far is your morgue?”

  “Not far,” Magistra Ubo replied. “But I must say that the findings are … unusually disturbing, even to the physicians who perform autopsies daily.”

  “Ah,” Francesca answered with a smile, “that is one perk of having been semi-draconic for the past thirty years. Unless a process involves a neodemon trying to introduce pathology into my own internal organs with fangs, tentacles, or more disturbing appendages, I am not going to be disturbed.”

  “With all respect, my Lady Warden,” Magistra Ubo said, “in this case, you may be wrong.”

  “To the morgue then,” Francesca said with a challenging smile. “The burning hells will freeze before I am wrong about this.”

  So Magistra Ubo led Francesca and Dean Sarvna down a narrow stairway. The rest of Francesca’s party and the dean’s followed close behind. As they went, Dean Sarvna expressed his dismay that the imperial kingdoms were no longer sending their young spellwrights to Port Mercy to be trained as physicians. In fact, he reported, Empress Vivian had opened an Imperial College of Physicians in Trillinon, which even accepted magically illiterate students.

  Clearly the dean was most troubled by the idea of non-spellwrights becoming physicians. Francesca, on the other hand, saw the empress’s refusal to send physicians to Port Mercy as an ominous political sign of imperial ambition.

  When the party reached the morgue, Magistra Ubo spoke to one of the attendants who led Francesca to a body covered with stained brown cloth. When Magistra Ubo pulled a sheet back, Francesca involuntarily stopped her breath.

  Her whole body tensed as she tried to avoid losing her composure … or vomiting. It took Francesca a moment to realize her mistake. She had trained as a physician in an era when disease caused by divinity had been so rare that she had seen virtually none of it. Worse, she had never before seen divinopathophysiology after the birth of her daughter, who had endured a lifetime of pain caused by divinopathology.

  Therefore, Francesca’s revulsion was intensified by the revulsion and loathing she had felt a thousand times before for herself and what her own linguistic nature had done to her daughter. Here it was again: proof that similarities, and not differences, caused the strongest loathing.

  There is no hatred like self-hatred.

  “Well, Magistra,” she said, still unable to look away from the nightmare uterus, “the burning hells might have just gotten a bit chilly.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Every city is divisible by its vices; or so Leandra had concluded after a decade hunting the incarnations of malicious prayers from every district of every city in the league.

  What was a banking district but a temple of greed? What were noble palaces if not monuments of vanity? Sanctimony bred in a city’s sacred places; prejudice in its courts; malice in its strongholds.

  Not that Leandra was a model of virtue. Not that she didn’t occasionally indulge in all the above vices. Not that her life’s driving force wasn’t a particular flavor of sanctimonious arrogance. But at least she was mindful of her potential for hypocrisy. The average-fine-upstanding-citizens, on the other hand, found no place more sacred than his city’s shrines, no place more noble than the wealthy neighborhoods. The only district in which the fine-upstandings found vice was the slum, where they saw every human failing from laziness to lust to stupidity to whatever transgression the given fine-upstandings felt they were not personally perpetrating on the world at large. That is probably why the Naukaa District—Chandralu’s slum—made Lea so unreasonably angry and violent.

  “Aren’t we supposed to go up to the Floating City?” Holokai asked as Leandra lead her party down the Jacaranda Steps. “Don’t you have to respond to that royal summons?”

  “There’s someone we need to talk to in the Naukaa.”

  “Doesn’t that place make you unreasonably angry and violent?”

  “Shut up before I punch you in the face, Kai.”

  “Oh, hey, yeah, that’s the place.”

  “Captain Holokai, what an excellent rapport you are developing with the Lady Warden,” Dhrun remarked.

  “Would be a lot more excellent if I could get her to punch you in the face instead of me.”

  Ignoring them, Leandra continued down the steps. She had hoped to find Baruvalman and ask him some pointed questions about why he had called her a “circle maker,” but the pitiful divinity complex was not among the miserables lining the steps.

  Though faint, Leandra heard the booming voice of the Bay Market’s crier. She looked toward the harbor and saw two new ships at anchor, one of them a Dralish galley. “Kai, is that The High Queen’s Lance?”

  Holokai squinted. “Always hard when I’ve seen the ship only from below, but … yeah, that’s her.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  Leandra swore. Her mother would soon hike up to their family compound or the Floating City. Time to get off the Jacaranda Steps. “Kai, hurry down to hear the crier’s news, then find us on the Naukaa’s second terrace.

  The shark god nodded and trotted off. The traffic going the other way was quick to step out of the way of his leimako.

  Leandra led Dhrun south onto the fifth terrace road. This was part of the Lower Banyan District, populated mostly by Cloud People and their fine pavilions. Leandra walked along the paved street until she found a narrow alley between two compounds. They hurried down the alley to the terrace’s edge. The path ended but some of stones in the terrace wall below protruded to make a staircase. There were no handrails and the stone steps were far apart.

  Leandra carefully descended to the fourth terrace, then hurried across its street and down another protruding-stones-staircase to the third terrace. Here they entered the Naukaa, the lowest of all of Chandralu’s neighborhoods, metaphorically and literally. There were no compounds here, only wobbly shacks. The walls were dirty, the roofs palm frond thatch, the streets muddy.

  While leading Dhrun down to the second terrace, Leandra noticed the usual swarms of thin children playing between the shacks. Gaunt mothers watched from low doorways. On the second terrace road, they found Holokai waiting for them. “What’s the news?” Leandra asked.

  “A bunch of refugee boats came in from Feather Island. The village there was attacked this morning, attacked bad.”

  Leandra grunted. “Like we need anything else to go wrong. Who attacked the village?” She started southward along the road.

  “Sounds like a lava neodemon,” Holokai said, falling in step behind her. “But there are other rumors.”

  “Let me guess,” she interrupted. “The rumors mostly accuse the Cult of the Undivided Society of attacking the village, or of worshiping the demons of the Ancient Continent, or of somehow inciting the War of Disjunction?”

  “Well, yeah, those rumors and the one about the Floating Island wandering into the bay.”

  “Lovely,” Leandra grumbled. “More dirt in muddy waters.”

  Dhrun said, “An attack on Feather Island, same time there are attacks on city deities. Connected?”

  “Likely so. We just have to figure out how.” Leandra touched her forehead. Through her godspell, she felt that most of her hour-from-now selves were filled with a particular type of frustration that only her father could inspire. Her mood darkened further
. Apparently, Nicodemus would soon return to Chandralu.

  The party continued along the street. Now in addition to the wobbly shacks and gaunt children, there were a few winehouses with women lolling about on second-story patios and sneering men standing around the doorways.

  Leandra looked about the district and muttered, “Skinny mothers, skinny fathers, skinny whores and pimps and children. This stupid world. Dhrun, what’s the only difference between that building”—she nodded to a whorehouse—“and a bank?”

  “When you pay the bank to screw you, you don’t enjoy it.”

  She frowned back at Dhrun. “I told you that one already?”

  Dhrun only bowed his head, but Holokai laughed and said, “Sunny mood you’re in today, Lea.”

  “Any sunnier and we should shade our eyes,” Dhrun added with a conspiratorial smile.

  “Don’t you two start grinning at each other.”

  “I thought you wanted us to get along,” Holokai complained.

  “I want you to not tear each other’s throats out, not get along.”

  The two divinities looked at each other. Holokai shrugged and Dhrun smiled.

  Leandra exhaled in exasperation. Here the second terrace curved left toward the bay. Several terraces above them to their right towered the massive structure of the Sea Temple. The many spires crowning its temple-mountain were a cool gray against the vivid blue sky.

  They crossed a small stone footbridge, a small civic stream running quickly below. A sudden whiff of feces made Leandra’s nose crinkle.

  From the temple at the city’s top, water from the volcano’s crater bubbled clean and clear. A system of channels divided the flow and ran it down and through the city, providing running water to all. As a result wealthy Chandralu was cleaner than any other city in the world. But in the city’s lowest and poorest terraces, the civic streams often ran dark with sewage.

  In Lorn there was a colorful, if also disgusting, saying that “Shit rolls downhill,” which Leandra took to mean that generally all bad things were sent down from the powerful to the weak. However, in beautiful Chandralu, shit ran downhill literally.

  So did cholera.

  The most powerful deity in the Naukaa was Eka, whose sole requisite was the curing of cholera. A recent outbreak of the horrible disease—which caused diarrhea severe enough to kill by dehydration—had inspired so many fervent prayers that Eka’s incarnation had gained an intense luminosity. At night, her aura could be seen winking fireflylike as she walked among Naukaa’s shacks.

  As Leandra led the two divinities over the footbridge, she frowned at the stream and wondered if the disease was coursing through the water. Then she glanced up at the dark volcano and thought about the Floating City, the massive amount of political, textual, and divine power concentrated there. So much power at the heights, so little down here.

  At the end of the terrace stood a winehouse larger and sturdier than its neighbors. The second-story patios were empty save for two monkeys perched on the railing, one grooming the other.

  “You two,” she said to Dhrun and Holokai, “if someone tries to free me from the burden of existence, do the favor to them first. Otherwise don’t do or say anything unless I tell you to.”

  Inside she found a dark room filled with benches and low tables. It hadn’t changed much. Three men sat near the window, studying some paper spread between them. Leandra had heard a family of Cloud People had recently bought the place. Likely these were the new owners.

  They wore the loose longvests and pants of the Cloud Culture and kept their hair plaited. Two were young men, thick black hair, wiry of build. The third had more silver than black in his hair but a broad chest and thick arms. A curved knife was tucked into his belt. “We don’t start serving until—” he started to say before looking up.

  “Thaddeus” was all Leandra said in response.

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to see you,” the old man said. As the younger men turned, light glinted from knives at their belts as well.

  “If I don’t see him, a paddle serrated with sharks teeth will be wielded in anger, and a four-armed god of wrestling will practice his time-honored craft of removing limbs from their sockets.” Leandra paused. “He wants to see me.”

  The two younger men flicked their eyes at silver hair, who studied her a moment before agreeing, “I think he wants to see you too.” He nodded to a doorway covered with a ratty curtain. “Up the stairs, second door on your right. I doubt he’s awake or that you can wake him.”

  “Typical,” Leandra snorted while climbing the steps. “Same winehouse, same room. Typical.” When she reached Thad’s door, Leandra didn’t bother to knock but nodded to Dhrun. With a four-handed shove, Dhrun broke the door into splinters and twisted metal.

  Leandra was about to step through when she groaned and raised a hand to her forehead.

  “What is it?” Holokai asked with apprehension.

  “I just had the distinct impression that in an hour, I’ll likely go from being frustrated with my father to feeling very grateful for him.”

  “What does that mean?” Dhrun asked.

  “I haven’t a clue. Never mind. Let’s go.” She stepped inside and found Thaddeus’s small room almost unchanged. The walls were lined with bookshelves and scroll racks. In the far corner, beneath the window and a tattered mosquito net, lay a middle-aged man sprawled on a sleeping pallet.

  Thaddeus’s handsome features were relaxed and almost angelic in sleep. His skin was light brown, his wild hair salt-and-pepper, matching the four-day stubble on his face. He wore a wrinkled tan longvest.

  A squat table beside the sleeping pallet held an ornate tray of opium paraphernalia. Leandra frowned at the slender pipe and the squat lamp. Strong memories then—tropical nights under a mosquito net, she and Thaddeus entwined, humid darkness, vivid dreams.

  “You want me to wake him?” Holokai asked.

  Leandra shook her head. “You won’t be able to. He’s a wizard. Well, used to be one. Before sleeping he likes to cast Numinous spells onto his brain to give himself quaternary cognition and intensify his opium dreams. He’ll have cast some rather viscous protective texts about himself.”

  She walked to his bedside. “Given how fast he’s breathing, I’d guess opium’s mostly worn off.” Beside the opium tray she found a folded piece of paper. In his familiar looping scrawl, Thaddeus had written “In Emergency, tear above my head.”

  Leandra moved the mosquito net and then picked up the sheet and unceremoniously tore it in half over Thaddeus’s forehead. She hoped whatever spell was written on the paper was unlocking his brain from its far wandering dreams. After a few moments, his lids began to flutter.

  So she poked him in the ribs, hard. “Good morning, Sunshine.”

  Clumsily, Thaddeus tried to push her away. She poked him again. “Time to rise and commune with the mysteries of the universe.”

  Thaddeus groaned. His eyelids opened slowly, revealing pinpoint pupils. He seemed to focus. Then he snapped awake and jerked away from Leandra as if she were a cobra. “Gah! Ah, ah,” he spluttered. “Gah! Lea?”

  “Probably not. Probably you’re hallucinating.” Using her foot, she tilted his bedside table until his opium paraphernalia crashed to the floor. Pretending at primness, she sat on the low table and then with false cheeriness asked, “So, how are things?”

  Thaddeus was still breathing hard. He looked from her to Dhrun to his four arms back to her again. “When you said you wanted a man who would always lend you a hand, I thought you just meant two of them.” He paused for a laugh that was not forthcoming. “No wonder it didn’t work out between us.”

  “That wasn’t the only way you were physically disappointing.”

  “If he physically surpasses me in some other way,” Thaddeus added, “I don’t want to see it.”

  “Not to worry. Unlike you, his most remarkable physical feats don’t involve scratching himself in public.”

  Thaddeus hauled himself into a sittin
g position. “I’m not hallucinating then; only you could be so caustic.”

  Leandra bowed if he had just complimented her.

  “Well,” Thaddeus said, “maybe your mother could have done better.”

  Leandra frowned. “You always know how to say the exact wrong thing.”

  “Call it a gift.”

  “I called it everything else already, guess we’ll go with gift.”

  “So why do I have the, ahem, pleasure of your sudden and ominous company? Not to mention the sudden and ominous company of your—” He looked from Dhrun to Holokai. “Would you say goons?”

  “I would say goons.”

  He cracked a lopsided smile. Still handsome, she had to give him that. Bastard. “Very well, why have I been graced with the company of the Warden of Ixos and her goons?”

  “Before I answer, tell me what you know of the fight on Cowry Street last night or of the recent attacks on city deities.”

  “There was violence?”

  “A brawl on Cowry Street. Since then small groups of men, some of them spellwrights, have been attacking minor deities throughout the city. What are people saying about this?”

  “Lea … last night I was…”

  “Oblivious to the world because you were smoking opium with halfhearted intentions of unlocking the secrets of your mind that then predictably devolved into satisfying the pathetic wants of your addiction?”

  “You make it sound so negative.”

  “Last night I got my hands on a godspell from the empire.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “At the cost of a disease flare, I had a particularly strong bit of prophecy.”

  “Were you able to perceive time as a landscape?” During their years of experimentation, Thaddeus had tried to write for her a Numinous spell that would give her the same glimpses into prophecy that her mother had. Most of his experiments had done nothing, a few had made her spectacularly intoxicated, and one caused her to vomit—violently but not without satisfaction—into Thaddeus’s lap.

  “No,” Leandra said patiently. “Nothing like that. The godspell allows me to feel forward into time. I have enough experience with it now to know that it’s accurate. Normally, it allows me to feel only an hour forward. But during a disease flare, it allowed me to feel a day forward. I felt beyond any doubt that sometime in the dark hours of this coming morning I will have to choose between murdering someone I love and dying.”