Spellbreaker

by Blake Charlton

  “But … why?” was all Leandra could think to ask.

  “Your command was to stay close to you and to protect you from any harm. To reveal myself only if you should be in mortal danger. And, not a half an hour ago, that happened when the airships bombarded you. A moment longer, and you would have died. I had no choice but to reveal myself. Your commands were quite clear: Once I revealed myself, I was to reveal to you and your opponents the nature of the struggle you all had unknowingly entered. Conveniently, I’ve caught all of you together.”

  Leandra shook her head, trying to keep up. “But … you could not have followed me my whole life. I would have noticed something.”

  “Ah, but you did.”

  “I did?”

  “When you were young, your parents protected you admirably well. I had no cause to come within a hundred miles. But when you became warden of Ixos, especially early on, you would take on neodemons too powerful. I tried to hide my influence as—”

  “The mosquito goddess,” Leandra said, suddenly understanding. “When we were in the mangrove swamp, hiding from her swarms.”

  The old man nodded. “I filled the air with smoke that confused the mosquitoes.”

  “We assumed it was a volcanic eruption,” she said numbly, then looked into his eyes. “And when we were fleeing the giant jellyfish neodemon?”

  “I made the sea hazy, as if covered with vog, so that you could escape in the night. And as soon as you were in the harbor, I attacked it during a storm and left it dead on the shore.”

  “And when I botched that conversion of the elephant mercenary god, you drove one of his lieutenants to insanity?”

  He nodded and his smile took on an almost avuncular quality. “Only those three times.” His gaze became indistinct. “There is little I have enjoyed since Typhon enslaved me, but those three times, when I could move against those gods … the sharp taste they had in my gullet.” He closed his eyes again.

  “But why protect me? Why would I order that?”

  “Because early in this life, you were vulnerable and weak. So you ordered me to help you become as strong as possible before I revealed the past and the possible futures to you and your opponents.” He nodded to Lotannu’s party.

  Leandra turned to see the wizard and his two hierophants staring at them with stony expressions.

  “I suppose that brings us,” Leandra asked, “to the possible futures.”

  The Savanna Walker was nodding. “As Typhon once explained to your parents, there are two visions of the Disjunction. And although no more demons remain on the Ancient Continent, both visions are coming to pass.”

  Leandra tapped her index fingers together in the Sea People gesture for “get on with it.”

  The old man continued. “Life is living language. Your goal was always to escape the brutishness of Language Prime. You started the war that ended civilization on the Ancient Continent by creating a metaspell that began to stop language misspelling. Your plan then was to sterilize all language and create a species more virtuous than humanity. The golem Fellwroth was to be the first such creature, but you were frozen in stone before he was completed. Typhon brought Fellwroth to this land, but being incomplete he failed. However, Typhon also began casting your metaspell to end misspelling in Language Prime, this resulted in the Silent Blight.”

  The Savanna Walker nodded to himself. “Though Typhon is dead, the Empress Vivian has continued to cast his metaspell. If the empress is victorious in the coming conflict, her metaspells will eventually make the world so sterile as to cause the collapse of civilization. In the resulting chaos, the few remaining divinities will easily enslave humanity.”

  Leandra looked at Lotannu. “Take that message to my aunt, won’t you? Especially the terrifying collapse of civilization and the enslavement of humanity part. He phrased it so well.”

  The wizard only narrowed his eyes.

  “The other vision of the Disjunction was devised by Typhon,” the old man continued. “In it, there is hybridization of divinity and humanity. You are the direct result of all this. And through Nicodemus’s metaspells, the demonic horde has been re-created in the myriad league deities. True, your deities don’t want to destroy all of humanity, only half of humanity, the half living in the empire.”

  “Lovely world we’ve built for ourselves,” Leandra muttered.

  The old man didn’t seem to hear. “The result of this conflict will hinge upon you and how you choose to manifest yourself in this life.”

  “There are choices?”

  “The two parts of your nature—divine and mortal—cannot tolerate each other for long. If you can avoid physical harm for ten or maybe twenty years, your divine nature will complete its maturation and kill your mortal body. You will arise then as Los Reborn. You will rally the league’s divine host and crush the empire. A new civilization conjoining humanity and divinity will arise and rule for millennia as mortality is slowly weeded out and divinity finds a way to propagate on its own. There will be no more death or disease. The world then is as unimaginable to us as the ocean is to an ant.”

  Leandra grumbled, “An ant doesn’t need to understand the ocean to have strong feelings about being thrown in it.”

  “However,” the Savanna Walker said, “should you die before your life runs its natural course—either by mismanagement of your disease or by violence—then the empire will prevail and—”

  “And my aunt will screw everything up in the other direction; I get it. But is there any way we could avoid destroying the underpinning principles of life as we know it?”

  The Savanna Walker produced another toothy grin. “Certainly, you just need to find two civilized and powerful people on opposite sides of the current political and religious divide to cooperate with each other and—”

  “No, stop. I knew we were all screwed when you got to ‘and powerful.’” She turned to Lotannu. “Do you think we could cooperate—”

  Two jumpchutes leapt up from the hierophants by Lotannu’s side. An instant later, the rigging had pulled all three men two hundred feet into the air and toward the circling Empress.

  Francesca crouched, ready to leap after prey. But pillars of black smoke erupted from the island, barring Francesca’s flight.

  Mother and daughter, dragon and woman, rounded on the Savanna Walker. He glared back at them with a leering smile.

  “Why?” Leandra growled.

  “The wizard must tell the empress what was said here. You commanded a war between the two forms of the Disjunction. Now it is so.”

  “Then I now command it to be God-of-gods damned not so,” she replied.

  “You commanded me to prevent you from altering previous orders,” the Savanna Walker said through a growing smile. She could see he enjoyed hurting his captor by enacting his captor’s orders.

  “Why would I command such a stupid thing?”

  “You are the dread god, remember? You want the War of Disjunction to happen.”

  “Tell me what possible future takes place if I command you to be free of slavery and then tear your face off. What happens then?”

  His smile stayed wide as he shrugged thin shoulders. “The empress would prevail. I have become the most powerful dragon in the world, and I’m dedicated to protecting you.”

  A blast of wind washed over them as the Empress engaged all her sails and flew off to wherever the imperial forces were concealed.

  “I don’t own slaves—” Leandra started to say.

  “You do now,” the Savanna Walker interrupted, still leering.

  “What happens if I set you free?”

  He closed his eyes and seemed to shudder with pleasure. “You can’t, and if you could I would fly as far from humanity as I could and find a part of the world populated by large and very dumb animals that taste good.”

  “So…” Leandra said while narrowing her eyes at the man. “So I have a slave.”

  He smirked. “Perhaps, when we go to Chandralu, your father will finish what he
started so long ago and kill me.”

  The mention of her father sent a spasm of pain through Leandra’s heart. She looked up at her mother, who looked down at her.

  “Well, old man,” Leandra said without looking away from her mother’s inscrutable draconic eyes, “if my father is still alive, he just might do that. Of course, he might also kill me.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  With Lotannu holding her arm, Vivian walked the war galley’s deck with a queasiness she associated with a recently broken fever. She had spent too long in her master spell, become frail. More upsetting had been the recovered memories and the revelation that Nicodemus had not been smuggling gods out of the empire, Los had.

  A bracing wind blew across the deck. All around, the standing islands stretched up to a tropical sky. Slowly the galley sailed between stone formations toward the bay’s open water. Other imperial ships—of sea and air—were taking similar courses.

  “How long until both fleets are in formation?” she asked.

  “No more than an hour.”

  Vivian brushed her long black hair out of her eyes. This was taking too long. Deconstructing the master spell had proven more difficult than anticipated. During their casting, Vivian had improved many of the subspells, but she had not known how to write them to be quickly stored in spellbooks. As a result, once Lotannu had explained the situation, she had needed several hours to reverse her previous edits. She had wanted to move against Los with speed, but now it was nearly midday and the fleets were just emerging from the standing islands.

  They had missed the chance to catch the dread god Los … no … the dread goddess Los when she was most vulnerable.

  But Vivian did have one consolation: Belowdecks several hundred spellbooks now preserved her master spell. If needed, she could reconstitute the spell. Gingerly she touched the Emerald that hung around her neck. All her life she had been training for this moment. “When should we expect the scouts to report back?” she asked.

  “Any moment now,” Lotannu answered. They both looked up at the sky but saw no lofting kites. “But I would be shocked to hear any report other than Leandra’s retreat—”

  “Los’s retreat,” she corrected.

  “… Los’s retreat into a Chandralu now bristling with defenses.”

  “We let our chance escape.”

  Lotannu bowed his head.

  “Not your fault, old friend. Any blame is mine.”

  They made another lap around the deck. From the railing, her commanders watched. They were of every rank and training in the empire: Spirish admirals, Verdantine nobles, wizards, pyromancers, and on and on. Among the crowd, Vivian’s eye fell upon Captain Cyrus Alarcon. He was dressed in his green hierophantic robes and turban. His veil was lowered to reveal his handsome face. Before this expedition, he had commanded the Empress, but at his request she had him transferred back to the Queen’s Lance. The encounter with the Savanna Walker had left both ships badly damaged. The smaller Queen’s Lance had been easier to repair and would fly in the coming attack.

  Vivian had no doubt the aerial battle would involve an encounter with the draconic Francesca. In that regard, Captain Alarcon’s personal knowledge of the creature would be invaluable. Vivian nodded to the captain. He bowed.

  Lotannu made a low, thoughtful sound. “Empress, did you have a chance to read my private communication?”

  He was speaking about an encoded Numinous message he had secretly cast to her. It described the Savanna Walker’s claims that Vivian’s metaspells would eventually sterilize Language Prime until disease and crop failures destroyed civilization.

  “I did. Certainly it is nothing to disregard; however, if we defeat Los, there won’t be a need to for me to continue casting my metaspell.”

  He pursed his lips but said nothing.

  “What is it?”

  “There may be a need to suppress the formation of new divinities, especially in conquered league kingdoms.”

  “True, but for how long? In only thirty years, we have unified the entire empire behind the idea that there should be no divinities other than the Creator.”

  “I worry that ideas and cultures are more persistent.”

  “We will address that in the future. But given our present situation, would you advise a different course?”

  He sighed. “With the reincarnation of Los not a hundred miles away, how could I? The dread god—”

  “Goddess.”

  “The dread goddess destroyed human civilization once already. We can’t allow her to do so again. But if our victory is to mean anything, we have to look past the immediate fight to our greater goals.”

  “How fortunate, then, that I have you to remind me of such greater goals after we win this war.” Vivian smiled. The sunshine washed away her queasiness while the galley made admirable progress. Already they were slipping past the last standing island into the open water. Ahead nearly a hundred ships were forming battle lines. Above, squadrons of airships glided in formation.

  Vivian looked at Lotannu. “It is torture,” she said softly, “to think of all the lives we could have saved if we had just caught Los out in the open.”

  “She was still protected by the Savanna Walker.”

  “Could he have survived the full strength of this fleet?”

  “What he did to the Empress and the Queen’s Lance was impressive. On the other hand, we’ve never applied the new pyromantic spells in a full fleet action.”

  Vivian nodded. “Spread the word that all sailors and pilots are to keep careful watch for any sign of the Savanna Walker. A pound of gold to whoever spots him first.”

  Lotannu bowed his head.

  Vivian looked across the water to the distant city. “Pitting the fleet against the Savanna Walker might be a bit of a gamble. But he is not the only one who has changed over the years. Every day since he stole my ability to spell, I have grown stronger. Today just might give me the chance to settle an old score.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Leandra wanted to see her father before the war began. Preferably, without her mother. That was going to be difficult.

  After the Savanna Walker finished his revelation, the obsidian shore became tarlike and swallowed him. Next the black island had sunk into the bay, prompting Leandra’s crew to hurry aboard the remains of their catamaran. Moving below the water, the Savanna Walker pulled them back toward Chandralu. When they reached the port, the Savanna Walker disappeared into the depths, apparently to keep from alarming the city’s war deities. So Leandra waited impatiently as her crew paddled into the docks. Francesca flew ahead.

  Once ashore, Leandra took Dhrun and ran up the many steps. Everywhere they saw citizens hurrying, merchants boarding up stores, red cloaks on patrol. Leandra’s future selves felt everything from panic, to triumph, to the nothingness of death. Not much time left.

  Her family’s pavilion was filled with red-cloak officers and hurrying messengers. No sign of Francesca. In the chaos, no one noticed Leandra and Dhrun as they ran up the stairs. She had just started to hope that she would reach her father without incident when she pulled back the screen to his room and found herself standing in front of Ellen D’Valin.

  Ellen looked up with her usual impassivity, but then recognition wrote tension lines around her eyes. “My Lady Warden,” she said with an infinitesimal bob of the head.

  Leandra became acutely aware that this greeting, in the delicate and restrained machinations of an academic physician, was akin to spitting in her face. Leandra also became acutely aware that she, in her own indelicate and unrestrained machinations, did not give a shit. “I’m here to see my father,” Leandra said and gave her a tight, artificial smile.

  Ellen mirrored her artificial smile and said, “I’ll wait in the hallway in case the Lord Warden should need medical attention.” She sidestepped around Leandra and then, with wider sidestepping, around Dhrun.

  Leandra forgot her anger as trepidation churned in her gut like wine in a rolling b
ottle. Out on the patio, her father walked carefully while Doria held a cane horizontally ahead of him so that he could grasp it with both hands. The pair slowly crossed the patio, turned and began to head back. Her father’s steps were tentative, his expression concentrated. The sight filled Leandra with images of his frailty. She had always supposed that she would die before he did. But now …

  Leandra paused, suddenly unsure about what she wanted to say. Did he hate her? She wanted to turn around. Then the absurdity of her situation struck her: discover you’re the immortal reincarnation of chaotic change, worry about talking to your father.

  Funny organ, the heart.

  So Leandra took a deep breath and was only mildly surprised when Dhrun took one of her hands. She gave his hand a squeeze. He returned the pressure. Then she let go and walked out on to the patio. “Dad.”

  Nicodemus and his physician turned, stood frozen as if a tiger had just dropped onto their patio. Then her father said, with admirable levelness, “Hello Lea.” No one moved for a long moment before Nicodemus said something softly to Doria. The old physician nodded before withdrawing from the patio with a glare for Leandra.

  It was then that Leandra noticed Dhrun had remained by the door to afford them at least the appearance of privacy. She felt a flush of gratitude for his thoughtfulness.

  Then she turned back to her father, who was holding the railing and looking out at the city. The docks bustled with soldiers in scale armor. Catamaran warships filled the harbor like knives in a drawer.

  “Your mother already told me.”