Spellbreaker

by Blake Charlton

  Nicodemus groaned.

  Doria snorted. “I am always so surprised by how much the future savior of humanity whines.”

  “I’d whine a lot less if I had a less cynical physician. Or if I weren’t such a phenomenal disaster as a father that I touched off the war that will doom humanity. At this point, I’m more likely to be the Storm Petrel than the Halcyon.”

  Ellen made a disgusted noise. “Lord Nicodemus, will you forgive me for speaking frankly?”

  “I want to say yes, but that might be a lie.”

  “Leandra has done something far worse than anything that can be explained by parenting.”

  Nicodemus said nothing, suffered a sudden and vivid memory of falling backward into paralysis. Fear flushed across him. His daughter … How could she …

  “There are more immediate matters—” Doria started to say in a diplomatic tone.

  “Indeed there are,” Ellen interrupted. “But eventually we will all have to face who Leandra has chosen to become. Fiery heaven, the woman had a spell cast on her mind to prevent her from being able to love. Who would do such a thing? I hope that when my Lady Warden returns, we can consider if we aren’t better off without her.”

  “Thank you, Magistra,” Doria said coldly. “We all know the situation, and our patient has a great deal on his mind. There will be plenty of time to discuss such matters.”

  Nicodemus still had his eyes closed but if he were to open them he had no doubt he would find the two physicians glaring at each other.

  The keloid scar on his back was itching again. Maybe that was a good thing, a sign that he was recovering sensation.

  “Forgive me, my Lord Warden, I am worried about your wife.” Ellen replied in a tone that, though flat, held a modicum of contrition.

  Still struggling to free himself from memories of falling into paralysis, Nicodemus found that he was breathing faster, fighting the urge to sit up. But if he were to try, his weakness would only increase his rising panic. With effort, he slowed his breathing.

  “There was a message from the Floating City,” Doria said with the tone of someone deliberately changing the subject. “The Trimuril has declared a state of martial prayer. All Ixonians are to worship war deities a minimum of three times a day.”

  “Seems reasonable,” Nicodemus said. He opened his eyes and found he could focus longer. That helped. Ellen had turned to frown out the window. Blurriness returned. Nicodemus blinked rapidly, tears.

  Doria cleared her throat. “There’s more news. Just before dawn, the Sacred Regent delivered a speech in the Floating Palace, a diatribe from what I heard. He warned that Ixos was under attack by a tyrannical empress who wanted to take away their gods and goddesses. He claimed that the empress wanted to destroy the metaspell written by the Halcyon—that’s you, by the way—which allows every human soul to shape the destiny of the archipelago by praying to whatever deity they see fit. The regent claimed that the empress wanted to destroy the gods and create a ruling class of the wizards. He asked if the audience would rather be enslaved by foreign spellwrights or stand together as equals before the host of divinity.”

  Nicodemus pursed his lips, was relieved they no longer tingled. “A bit exaggerated, but not too far off the mark.”

  Ellen sniffed. “If Leandra were here, she’d say there’s no difference between empire and league. She’d say that the deities were just as tyrannical as the wizards would be.”

  “Perhaps,” Doria said coldly, “we should let the Lady Warden of Ixos speak for herself.”

  Nicodemus tried to preempt any further argument. “And how was the Sacred Regent’s speech received?”

  “Well,” Doria answered. “The whole city is in a fervor of prayer.”

  “I hope it will be enough.” Nicodemus tried to scratch his nose, but his clumsy hand only flopped first onto his chest and then his face. But by shaking his head, he managed to find relief.

  Over by the window, Ellen drew in a sharp breath. A moment later she murmured “Fiery heaven…”

  “What is it?” Doria asked.

  “Out on the bay, there’s—”

  But then her words were interrupted by shouting and heavy footsteps. Nicodemus opened his eyes and with effort turned his head toward the door. The footsteps grew loud and John’s voice sounded. “Nico! Nico!” The screen door flew back. John stood in the hall, Rory just behind him. “Nico, come up to the roof.”

  “John,” Doria scolded, “the Lord Warden is hardly in a state to dash up several steps. What is it? What’s happened?”

  “I don’t know. No one does.”

  “But what is it?” she asked.

  “I can’t say. He needs to come see.”

  “He can’t—” Doria started to say when Nicodemus managed to prop himself up on his elbows.

  “He can try,” Nicodemus finished. “Someone get me a walking cane or find some way to support me.”

  In the end, they constructed an impromptu stretcher out of spear shafts and a rug stitched together by Magnus spells. Rory and John carried him up to the roof.

  They set him down on the complex’s eastern edge. Slowly, laboriously, Nicodemus sat himself up and dangled his legs over the roof’s edge. He had to blink his eyes repeatedly, knuckle tears out of them.

  “No one knows when it appeared,” John said beside Nicodemus. “It seems it was just sort of … there … when the sun came up. You can see it directly in front of you. And that eruption. That’s new. It wasn’t doing that when I came to get you.”

  Nicodemus finished rubbing his eyes. When he opened them, he saw the familiar terraced city falling away to the bay. The blue water ran out to standing islands. A gray haze hung above the horizon, which Nicodemus had sometimes seen above a wildfire on the Lornish plains. The sun had risen above the eastern headlands and now shone hauntingly crimson.

  But what commanded the eye’s attention, what filled Nicodemus’s heart with confusion and fear, was what rose up from the gray islands. He needed to make sure what he had seen was real.

  Far out on the bay, rising from the water and above the standing islands, was a dark mountain that, from its peak, was spewing clouds of blackness.

  Nicodemus whispered the first word that came to his mind, “Los.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  As Francesca fell, shards of pain bore into her body. Her thoughts spun. At last instinct took over. She twisted to right herself. Shrapnel from the pyromantic cannon had torn holes through her wings. Frantically she slowed her descent enough to land gracelessly on an uneven standing island. She slid and had to scramble for purchase.

  A barrage of thunderclaps along with the darker boom of cannon fire rolled across the bay. Francesca looked up and saw that the Queen’s Lance had formed on the Empress’s wing. Both airships were discharging what seemed to be their full ordinance into the bay.

  Panic raced through Francesca’s heart. The airships had caught her daughter and were bombarding her with so much force that, in a few moments, not even underwater Holokai would survive. This was it then. This was how her daughter died, how Francesca’s hope was extinguished. She launched herself at the airships. But no sooner had she taken wing than a wave of hot wind slammed into her, sent her tumbling. It took all her strength to keep from dashing into the standing islands. The air reeked of sulfur.

  Francesca found herself flying up into wan, ruby sunlight. The wide tropical sun, still not far above the horizon, had become a blurry crimson disk. Francesca’s mind filled with images of the world’s end: The seas boiling with blood, the sky blotted out by smoke, the sun dying.

  Then she realized that the blast of sulfurous wind had also blown the Empress and the Queen’s Lance off their course. In fact, the Queen’s Lance had struck one of the standing islands. Her aft sails were in disarray and several lofting kites were blooming from her wings as the hierophantic crew abandoned ship. The Empress had fared better, rising high enough to clear the limestone pillars. Francesca could just make out the Emp
ress’s crew, who were pointing eastward.

  She turned, and at first she could not understand what she was seeing. It felt as if she had flown into a nightmare.

  Three miles away, above the gray limestone islands, jutted a slender mountain of blackness. From its peak spewed a cloud of what she would have called smoke if it were not contorting so unnaturally. Within the black air writhed arms and hands, human mouths filled with dragon’s teeth, long twisting tentacular appendages.

  Several memories turned inside Francesca’s mind unlocking the nightmarish vision. Nicodemus had said that the bay near Feather Island had been hazy, the air sulfurous as if covered with vog. On Feather Island, Nicodemus found hardened lava flows of a lava demon attack. The captured pyromancer described smoke that had gotten inside the villagers and driven them mad.

  In Chandralu there had been rumors of a Sea People fishing boat found with half the crew dead and the other half insane. Other rumors said the fabled Floating Island had wandered into the bay. Francesca had dismissed the reports of whirlpools and black smoke billowing from nothingness into the sky. But now she understood. The black mountain and phantasmagoric smoke were manifestations of a lava divinity too powerful to be a neodemon. This must be demon from the Ancient Continent.

  As she watched, the smoke billowed up with unbelievable speed and then down onto the bay, over which it rolled like a river of air. The phantasmagoric shapes—bones and eyes and entrails—rolled along within the smoke, all squirming over each other, reaching for where the airships had attacked Leandra’s catamaran.

  Leandra! Francesca’s fear for her daughter overcame her horror. With new strength, she flew toward where she supposed her daughter had been. The captain of the Empress was thinking along similar lines; the massive airship dove toward the previous point of bombardment. Again the Empress moved with a speed that Francesca would have thought impossible.

  Francesca flew over two standing islands while eying the airship and the nightmare smoke to see who would get to Leandra first. She strained against her own exhaustion. But both the airship and the smoke were too fast. The Empress dove down into an opening in the standing islands.

  A moment later, Francesca flew over a row of limestone formations and saw what was left of Leandra’s catamaran. The starboard hull was missing and the crew were cutting off what was left of the central decks from the portside hull. Around and below the crippled ship swam Holokai’s black silhouette.

  Not five hundred yards above the ship, the Empress was diving fast. Lightning leapt from the airship and struck a limestone formation behind the catamaran. Francesca strained her wings but felt herself weaken. The Empress was four hundred yards away from the catamaran. On the other side of the catamaran, the black smoke wrapped its fingers around the standing islands and disgorged itself across the water.

  The catamaran’s crew pointed and gestured. Two of them dove overboard and began swimming away from the smoke.

  The Empress was three hundred yards away.

  The smoke flung out tendrils that raced around the catamaran to enclose it in a wall of writhing shapes.

  Francesca’s wings faltered.

  The Empress was two hundred feet away. Lightning jumped out from the airship, arcing for the catamaran. But tentacles of smoke shot up and wrapped around the lightning. The billowing segments of the smoke flashed like a thundercloud. A chain of lightning ran around the circle of smoke before dying out. A second arc of lightning shot out from the Empress, and again the smoke intercepted and dissipated the bolt.

  Confused, Francesca pulled out of her dive and flew a slow circle. In her flight from the Empress, Leandra seemed to have stumbled upon the lava demon’s stronghold. But that would be too coincidental. Now that the nightmare smoke was protecting the catamaran, Francesca suspected that what was unfolding before her was more than coincidence.

  The Empress swung all her side sails down and forward. The resulting blast of air flattened the swells on the bay but passed through the black air without effect. It would have scattered mundane smoke into a thousand turbulent spirals.

  The Empress came to a halt so quickly that a hierophant slipped and fell into the air. His green robes billowed into a jumpchute. Black ropes erupted from the smoke and reached out to snare him. Over the white roaring of the wind, Francesca could just recognize his shrieks, frantic yellow sounds.

  In the next instant, three plumes of smoke struck the underside of the Empress’s foresails. Three bolts of lightning leapt away from the ship to strike either standing islands or aspects of the black smoke.

  The Empress’s crew burst into panicked action. Many tore strips of sailcloth from the ship and cast them as warkites toward the smoke. But the dark air consumed the constructs as implacably as the sea consumes the drowned. Then the smoke enveloped the airship’s entire bow.

  Francesca spotted a black-robed figure moving about the hull, waving his hands. Arcs of gold and silver flashed from his hands and began cutting away the ship’s foresails. This had to be Lotannu Akomma. Soon the green robes joined him. In moments the Empress’s bow fell away and vanished into the churning smoke. As if freed from a tether, the Empress leapt back.

  Francesca flew another circle and looked down at the catamaran. Maybe ten surviving sailors sat on the remaining hull. Most of the center deck had been cut away. Francesca could make out Dhrun and her daughter, who for some reason was dripping wet and pulling on a blouse and lungi. Holokai had disappeared, likely fled.

  Though the smoke continued to swirl around the catamaran, it drew no closer. However, one of the sailors who had jumped overboard was caught by a tendril of the black stuff. It seemed to wrap around his head, burrow into his face.

  For a moment, the sailor sank below the surface. When he resurfaced and began swimming toward the catamaran, Leandra pointed and the wrestling god removed both his swords and went to the railing. The swimmer pulled himself up on deck and charged the god. Dhrun sidestepped him and with a wrestler’s grace threw the man hard onto the deck. Without pause, the attacker rose and again and threw himself at the god.

  Again Dhrun dodged away from the charge, but this time he flipped the swimmer back into the water. A moment later the sailor’s head reappeared. But then, for no reason that Francesca could tell, the maniac dove down and did not come up.

  Francesca glanced at the Empress. She was hovering as her crew swarmed around her, trying to reconfigure her after the damage. So Francesca flew another circle and saw a body floating by the catamaran. It was the sailor who had been tainted by the smoke. He had drowned himself. Nausea churned in Francesca’s gut as she realized that this was the fate that had befallen the villagers of Feather Island.

  The Empress’s crew had stabilized the ship, but she had lost a third of her length. Her capacity to generate lightning seemed to have been lost with her bow. Still she circled.

  Francesca studied the smoke, wondering if she could somehow lift her daughter out of the wreckage. At that moment, the smoke parted to the east, forming a corridor of open water to the black volcano from which it had come. It seemed that the lava demon wanted a word with Leandra.

  Francesca flew down toward the boat, but as she did the smoke rose in threatening plumes and spikes. She climbed again and continued to circle. The Empress kept her distance.

  On the water, Leandra seemed to come to the same conclusion that her mother had about the smoke. She made some gestures and her crew began to row. Slowly, the remains of the catamaran made its way down the corridor of smoke toward the volcano.

  Exhausted Francesca could not risk an attack on the Empress, which did not look in any shape for battle either. So both dragon and airship trailed after Leandra’s ship. The sun had risen higher in the sky and lost some of its crimson hue.

  After a half hour, they reached the volcano. It seemed to be made of obsidian and was almost perfectly symmetrical. As its steep central spire descended, the black glass mountain expanded until it became horizontal in all directions for
several hundred yards before meeting the lapping bay water. The island appeared to be empty. No buildings, no openings or caves, no plants or birds, not even sand or pebbles.

  As Leandra’s ship neared the shore, the black smoke evaporated. At first, Francesca thought she had hallucinated its disappearance, but then Leandra’s crew called out in surprise. Judging by the gestures, some sailors wanted to escape. Leandra, on the other hand, was shaking her head.

  Francesca wondered what could possibly be going through her daughter’s mind. Though it was unlikely that the deity who had brought Leandra to this island would let her go, she could at least try. But Leandra continued to shake her head and then gestured to the island. With a four-armed god by her side, the sailors did not seem to have much chance for negotiation.

  So the crew paddled the battered vessel onto the strange shore. Francesca dove and circled close. There was no eruption, no return of the black smoke. Above her, a swath of white cloth broke away from the Empress and formed a lofting kite that held three figures in its dangling harness. Two wore green robes, the other black: Lotannu and two hierophantic pilots for escorts.

  Francesca watched as Lotannu’s jumpchute landed the three imperials on the island. Leandra’s sailors formed a protective knot around her, but Lotannu and his wind mages kept their distance.

  With a few wingbeats, Francesca landed on the volcanic island. The shore felt disturbingly warm under her feet, and her claws slid across the glassy rock. Francesca stared down at the black substance and bared her draconic teeth at it.

  “Mother.”

  With a start, Francesca brought her head up and discovered Leandra standing in front of her. Dhrun and her crew stood beside her. The sailors looked up at Francesca with awe, but Leandra regarded her mother as coolly as she might over breakfast. It was hard for Francesca to tell, perspective being so different in draconic form, but it seemed as if her daughter had grown taller.