Spellbreaker

by Blake Charlton

  Nicodemus slid the door closed and to his surprise found John waiting in the hall. “I came to see if there was anything I could do for the druids.” He looked at the door behind Nicodemus. “She okay?”

  “I think so. At least she’s sleeping well. Thank you, old friend. Maybe you could see if Doria could use any help.”

  “You know she hates it when you have people check in on her because you think she’s a little old lady.”

  Nicodemus absently scratched the keloid on his back. “I know, but she is a little old lady. Humor me.”

  John gave him a doubtful look before nodding. “How about you, Nico? You all right?”

  “As right as I can expect to be.” He chewed his lip. “There is a lot riding on tonight, and all I can do is wait.”

  “Francesca or Leandra?”

  “Both.”

  “Of course it’s both.” John smiled. “Did you ever think that we’d be having these problems?”

  “Never in a hundred thousand years. So, will you check on Doria?”

  John said that he would and that they’d both come down to the kitchen soon. So Nicodemus went back down to the pavilion and happily found the banquet table put away and every face shining with relief. One of the servants showed him to a small room that abutted the kitchen. Somewhere they had found a Southern-style table and chairs. Rory and Sir Claude sat side by side. Their backs were to the door and they hadn’t noticed him.

  Rory was leaning forward, his right elbow propped at a right angle on the table so that he could rest his forehead upon his hand. His expression was slack with fatigue. Sir Claude sat next to him. The knight’s posture was, as usual, dignified, but he was leaning slightly forward so that he could comfortably reach out and hold Rory’s other hand. Sir Claude was staring at a space somewhere above Rory’s head. Together they became an icon of exhaustion finding comfort in company.

  Nicodemus paused for a moment, the sight both accentuating and relieving his own fatigue. It made him think of the past thirty years, of the others who had joined his service. There had been Neha, the fiery hydromancer who had preceded Doria. A rebellious angel of lightning had killed her during the Tonatus Uprising. Then there had been old Sir Robert, the highsmith assassinated by a neodemon of darkness in Bearsleton. Others had died in his service, too many others, and Nicodemus was ashamed that he couldn’t recall all of their names.

  Nicodemus was not aware of making any sound, but Sir Claude withdrew his hand from Rory’s and calmly said, “Good evening, my lord.” Rory sat up straight and looked at Nicodemus.

  They both started to stand but Nicodemus waved them down. “No, no, please don’t mind me.” He sat at the head of the table.

  As ever, Sir Claude seemed composed and a little distant, but Rory looked first at Nicodemus then at Sir Claude with a haggard expression.

  “Please,” Nicodemus said, “don’t be any different than you were.”

  After a short silence, Sir Claude said, “This, apparently, is how we were. Which…” He looked at Rory and gave him a brief smile. “Which will do for now.”

  Rory’s expression relaxed.

  Nicodemus was searching for something else to say when a flash of blue silk appeared in the doorway. “Everyone breathe easy,” Doria announced as she walked into the room, “the old bat hasn’t died yet. Thank you, Lord Warden, for sending the hospitality squad to go get her.” She nodded back at John who was standing in the doorway and giving Nicodemus his best I-told-you-so smile.

  Nicodemus and the two other men stood. “Doria,” he said, “I’m sorry for setting John on you; I didn’t want you to miss dinner.”

  “No chance of that while my heart still has blood in it,” the old hydromancer said as she pulled up a chair. John moved beside her.

  When Nicodemus motioned for them to do so, they all sat. A few moments later, the cook and his assistant entered with a steaming tureen. The party fell silent in expectation as the soup was ladled out. They drank it from the bowl in Ixonian fashion. It was rich with chicken and coconut milk, flavored with ginger and lemongrass. Nicodemus could feel its warmth fill him.

  When the cook took the soup away, hunger’s spell of silence broke and they lapsed into easy conversation, directed mostly by Doria. Nicodemus tried not to study Rory and Sir Claude, but on the few occasions he glanced over they seemed at ease. In fact, they even managed to stir up one of their usual teasing matches.

  An air of relaxation came over the party, seemed to come welling up out of them. They had after all brought down the River Thief. The omens of war and Disjunction, they were problems for another day.

  This was, Nicodemus reasoned, how every mortal lived: The certainty of death put aside for the comfort of a hot bowl of soup, a vivid blue sky, a friend’s laugh. So it was that when the chef returned with rice and curry, the party was filling the small room with laughter and raucous conversation.

  Even so Nicodemus found himself lapsing into silence and memories of dinners past, companions now dead. Then he remembered the young pyromancer he had captured on Feather Island. She would be in the infirmary now. He wondered if the physicians had operated on her hand yet to close the skin. He wondered if she were, at that precise moment, in pain or a drugged stupor. She had lost her fingers just that morning. Had there been a way he could have prevented that? Any way?

  Suddenly Nicodemus realized that the chef was standing beside him, asking if he should like a shot of kava or rice wine. Nicodemus chose the kava and then waited until everyone else had been served before raising his voice. “A toast.” He lifted his cup. “To victory and confusion to the Disjunction.” These were his usual words and they sponsored the usual sincere cheers.

  But after they drank, he raised his cup again. “These are unusual times—”

  “Even more so than usually,” Doria interrupted.

  “Yes, more than usually,” Nicodemus agreed, “and there are darker days ahead, but I cannot imagine finer spellwrights with whom to face them. So here is to you: my companions, my friends.” They cheered just as loudly for this but drank deeper.

  When Nicodemus sat back down, they followed and the conversation and laughter resumed. He motioned for the cook to take away the wine and kava. A few toasts would keep up morale, but hangovers tomorrow would tempt disaster.

  After saying a quick prayer to the Creator that his wife and daughter were safe, Nicodemus turned his attention back to his friends. John and Doria, Rory and Sir Claude, their faces were bright with happiness and what youthful vitality was left to them. Their world was a beautiful one, and he hoped that they would all find enough of it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “So Thaddeus was the one?” Dhrun asked as they walked toward the Jacaranda Steps. “He was the loved one you had to murder?”

  Leandra glanced back. Dhrun was looking at her with concern, Holokai with incomprehension. “I could have kept Thaddeus alive,” Leandra said. “But that would have required unacceptable risk.”

  Dhrun was silent for a moment and then asked, “Meaning, you might still have to murder someone you love?”

  “Loved,” she corrected.

  “Someone you loved?”

  “I might.”

  Dhrun’s expression did not change. “That is a pity.”

  “It is. Is something wrong, Dhrun?”

  “The tetrodotoxin kills because the victim can’t breathe, but sailors give rescue breaths to men rescued from drowning. What if someone breaths for Thaddeus?”

  “They would have had to discover him already and would have to breathe for him for ten hours.”

  “Then we’re safe?”

  “Very safe. Even if his heart still beats as we speak, he’s dead.”

  “It’s funny to think about. But I guess I’m not mortal.”

  “Part of you is.”

  “Yes, but it’s a very cocky part.”

  “I suppose the common thinking is to assume that death is a state. Some place you are put. But really, death
is any state from which someone cannot return … Oh!” A sudden half-grasped realization flashed through Leandra’s mind. She stopped.

  “What is it?” Holokai asked, lowering his leimako.

  “Nothing dangerous,” she said and started walking. “Just an idea about how to escape…” Her voice trailed off as her stream of thoughts flowed backward and forward in time. She realized that an hour ago she had sensed through the prophetic godspell a flush of surprise and danger. At the time, she had attributed it to her encounter with Thaddeus. But now she knew an opportunity to alter her futures was approaching.

  A faint sound then, low then high and keening. Leandra held her hand up for Holokai and Dhrun. “There’s … something…”

  Dhrun pointed down the street. Out from between two houses shambled something human in shape but with a massive rotating head. A sallow aura lined his silhouette. On the evening breeze came a low, haunting wail. The figure lurched toward them. Holokai stepped in front of Leandra while Dhrun prowled to the right.

  Leandra studied the stranger. Though the loveless spell had dramatically sharpened her vision in Thaddeus’s room, that effect had lessened. Though still superhuman, her vision was no longer the wonder she had previously known. As such, at their present distance, Leandra distinguished only a few of the newcomer’s features as he hobbled toward them. He had seven arms—one of them a stump above the elbow, the uppermost left entirely missing as if the limb had been plucked off.

  The figure lurched, seemed to slip, fell. His arms went flailing and there came a howl. When he struggled back to his feet, Leandra saw that one of its lower left arms had snapped off like a twig. He was carrying the lost stump in one hand. The face on his cylindrical head was that of a praying mantis. “It’s all right,” Leandra said. “It’s only Baruvalman.”

  Holokai relaxed. “Baru don’t look good.”

  Baru lurched toward them with his head spinning, now an infant’s, now a scared warrior’s. His wailing changed from an infantile shriek to an adult moan. “Lady,” he was crying, “lady, help me!”

  Leandra looked around, saw nothing but the muddy streets and dilapidated buildings of the Naukaa. No ambush. Even so she said, “Be alert.”

  As Baru limped toward them, the arm he had been holding broke apart. The fingers fell to the ground and then burned with crimson light. By the time the pitiful divinity complex stood before Leandra, the fractured limb had crumbled into nothing. Surprise swirled through Leandra. She had never seen a deity deconstruct on its own.

  Baruvalman was looking at her with the face of a wrinkled crone, eyes wide, slack mouth, few teeth. “Great lady, help me. They say you were doing battle on this terrace. I knew I had to come to you. I knew. You must help me. There has been a mistake.” The divinity reached out two hands toward Leandra, but in the next instant Holokai stepped between them.

  Baru stumbled backward, his head swiveling around to show the old warrior’s. He fell to his knees, all remaining hands pressed together in supplication. “Please, great circle maker, take pity! Your agents have mistaken poor Baruvalman, but this humble god is your servant. He is worth saving from the godly sickness. Cure me!” Tears ran down his cheeks.

  Leandra frowned. “Baru, what are you talking about?”

  “It was your people. They said they were going to pray for me. They did say that. They very much did say that. I was begging and they said they would, but when I showed them…” His head spun to the child’s and he pressed his forehead to ground while blubbering.

  “Come now, Baru, it can’t be as bad as that,” Leandra said. He was a divinity complex and should heal quickly. “Whoever approached you, they were no officers of mine.”

  He began wailing louder.

  “Pull it together, Baru. I’ll do what I can. Who was it that approached you?”

  “A man and a woman, both in new longvests. They said they had just come in from the Outer Island Chain and needed a divine guide. They said they would pray for me if I would show them around. I agreed and led them to a warehouse they said they wanted to see. Yes, very faithfully I did. But behind the warehouse, something happened. They were spellwrights of some kind.” He sat up and his head began to spin, all his faces wide-eyed as if searching the street.

  “Go on,” Leandra said.

  Still on his knees, Baru settled on the scared warrior’s face. “They wanted to know about the demon in the bay. They said they would hurt me if I left anything out.”

  Again Leandra looked around the street for possible threats. Nothing. “And what did you tell them?”

  “Only what Baruvalman knows, which is what everyone on the street knows, what everyone is saying.”

  “Which is what?”

  “There is a lava demon on the bay.”

  “Neodemon.”

  “No, no, no. Great Lady, don’t you know this? This is a demon from the Old Continent. The War of Disjunction is here. No doubting it now. Your Cult of the Undivided Society has finally brought a demon of the Ancient World across the ocean, and now he is stalking the bay.”

  “My cult? I belong to no cult.” Which was technically true; the cult belonged to her rather than the other way around.

  “B-but great lady, it is said that after the lava demon burned Feather Island you converted the demon and made your own cult. That is why they are calling you ‘circle maker,’ because you will turn the demons all the way around and use them against themselves, turn them around in a complete circle.”

  Leandra sighed in relief. She had feared that somehow her secrets had leaked. “Wild rumors, Baru, nothing more. I’ve found no demon.”

  “Then … you have not usurped the Cult of the Undivided Society who worship the ancient demons?”

  “There is no such thing as the Cult of the Undivided Society,” she lied.

  The pitiful god began wailing again. “Then I am doomed. There is no hope for poor Baruvalman. Poor poor Baruvalman, who was a humble god of this city. Now I have the lava demon’s sickness in me and now I will die of the divine disease!”

  “Divine disease?”

  Baru only wailed.

  “Baru! I can’t help you if I don’t know what is going on.”

  The pitiful deity quieted enough to look at her with the old crone’s face.

  “What do you mean by ‘divine disease’?”

  “Truly, the great circle maker does not know?”

  “Truly, you’re making this circle maker feel not so great. No, I don’t know or I wouldn’t have asked.”

  “But … then…” He looked up at her and his head rotated to that of the baby, his mouth pulled back with fear and confusion.

  “Baru!”

  His head swiveled back to the warrior’s. “The disease is like leprosy of the gods. The first struck down was the god of the Banyan districts. After he was attacked, his incarnation began rotting. His limbs fell off, so did his nose, right off his face. Yes, yes, it’s true. I have heard it from everyone. He deconstructed this afternoon.”

  “Dhamma told me only that the Banyan god was missing.”

  “That is only what the red cloaks are saying because they are not knowing. They are saying the street is full of rumors, but this is no rumor. Too many are saying so. And more humble gods have gone vanished. The red cloaks are saying that it is they are being safe, but no, no. The street has it that they have the demon’s disease, that they are coming apart. And now I have the disease.” He gestured to his recently lost limbs. “You must help your faithful servant Baruvalman. Please, please, you must.”

  A dull headache pressing down on Leandra’s temples. The pitiful god’s story was all mixed up. “Baru, I need you to stay calm and tell me what you know. You were telling me about the two spellwrights who attacked you behind the warehouse. They wanted to know about the lava demon out on the bay. You told them about the rumors … and then what?”

  He shuddered. “Then they infected me with the divine sickness. And that was when Baruvalman thought that they wer
e your agents, great lady. And Baru cried and yelled and begged for them to let him go because he was a friend. But they would not listen and grabbed his arm.”

  He shuddered again and all of his remaining hands went to the socket where the uppermost left arm and shoulder had been. “But brave Baruvalman pulled and pulled and then the arm came off in their hands. And Baru ran as fast as he could and hid behind some crates outside another warehouse. Behind him, the spellwrights said that there was nothing good or useful in Baru’s arm and there was no use chasing after him.”

  His head swiveled back to the warrior. “So then, once the spellwrights had gone, Baru asked around where you might be, great lady. When they told me to come here, I came here. But I am brittle now because of the divine sickness. You saw, you saw.” He gestured to the forearm that moments ago had snapped when he had fallen.

  Leandra drew in a breath and tried to piece together what Baru had told her. Long experience had told her that wild street rumors sometimes grew from seeds of truth. “You thought the spellwrights that attacked you were my officers?”

  “They gave me the sickness, so they had to be of the lava demon.”

  “You’re jumping to a conclusion.”

  “But great lady, where else would the sickness come from?”

  Leandra was not even sure the divine sickness was real, but she had never seen anything like what had happened to Baru. “I am not sure, and I suppose it is entirely possible that whatever is stalking the bay is an ancient demon. I must investigate further before making any conclusions. Baru, I am afraid there is nothing I can do for you at this moment, and I cannot be late for—”

  “No!” Baruvalman wailed, his head spinning. “No, no, no, you must help. You must!”

  “Baru, we can keep you safe by—”

  “No, no, no!” He lurched toward her, arms outstretched. Instantly Dhrun was beside him, two of her muscular arms grasping Baru’s to restrain him. There followed two loud cracks and a dull flash. An astounded Dhrun stood holding two of Baruvalman’s arms—one broken off at the elbow, the other at the shoulder.