Leandra laughed. “You didn’t tell Doria? Will she disapprove?”
Nicodemus sighed. “Yes, and she’ll be good enough at disapproving when she sees it. No need to give her the advantage of information beforehand.”
Doria coughed. “You two are giving me a very bad feeling about this.”
They walked down the pavilion steps. Five watchmen were waiting. Nicodemus nodded to the captain and they set out into the night. The streets and steps were empty save for the crews clearing the rubble. When Doria realized where they were headed, she groaned. “I changed my mind. You two aren’t giving me a very bad feeling so much as a catastrophically bad feeling.”
A quarter hour later, they arrived in the infirmary.
The pavilion was packed with those who had been injured during the day’s attack. Three guards and an older physician waited for them. The physician bowed and introduced himself as Magister Sarvna, dean of the infirmary. “Forgive me, Lord Warden, that I must greet you with such a small party; my staff are very busy.”
“Yes, Magister, of course,” Nicodemus replied. “How is he?”
“Better. We’ve kept him restrained and censored, as your lady wife ordered. No one has touched him. In fact, he woke up a few hours ago, but his mental status seems … altered.”
“Altered?”
“He can’t seem to make any sense with his words.”
Nicodemus grimaced. “Does he speak gibberish with lots of rhyming and repetition of similar sounding words?”
“Yes, it is peculiar.”
“His mental status isn’t altered; it’s returned to its natural state. Take us to him.”
After bowing, the dean led them through a maze of hallways to a small room lit by two glowing blue vials that the hydromancers used as textual lamps. A single bed stood in the middle of the room. Lying upon it, frail and disturbingly pale, was the Savanna Walker. All four of his thin limbs had been bound to the bed frame with both metal and textual bonds.
He appeared to be sleeping. But when Nicodemus and Leandra stood at the foot of his bed, he let out a creaking laugh. “Nicoco, the retardation at the end of creation … Nicoco…” He laughed again.
“Thank you, Magister,” Nicodemus said to the dean. “All of you, please leave us. You too, Doria. Please wait in the hallway; we may need you.”
The Savanna Walker continued to laugh and croak “Nicoco” as the others withdrew.
“He didn’t sound like this before,” Leandra whispered. “He was more … formidable.”
“Because no more diamond mind,” the Savanna Walker moaned. “No more, no more diamonded minded. My fertile, filthy mind is back but with nothing else.” His eyelids opened wider, his bright green eyes locking on Nicodemus’s. “Cosang, consanguinity, we are here again. We are the retardation at the end of creation.”
Nicodemus kept his expression impassive. A frown tugged at the corners of Leandra’s mouth.
“Oh, but Nicoco, I know why you came. Because I am no more. Freedom and a filthy mind are mine again but nothing else no more no more. Always and in all ways, so much hunger. But I will have it no more no more, only the retardation at the end of creation.”
“James Berr,” Nicodemus said slowly.
The ancient man cringed, turned his head sharply away. “No, no, Nicoco! Nonono—” His panicked words decayed into a wheezing cough. His whole body convulsed which each breath until he fell back in exhaustion.
“James,” Nicodemus said, “what happened out there?”
The old monster lay silent. When Nicodemus repeated the question, his lips drew back, revealing jagged yellow teeth. “It was our cosang! She did it! She did it to me! So iron-minded!” Then he fell back, completely slack.
“Who did what?” Nicodemus asked. “Our cousin? Vivian?”
“Yesyesyes! Her that did it to me and to all of you.”
“Did what?”
“She saw what was keeping me diamond-minded and the illusion I spun. The smoke and void that everyone sees the horrors in. She saw how the dragon changes other minds. And she reached out with her iron words and she took it away from me. She snuffed out my draconicness and made me free.”
Leandra spoke, “So you can’t inhabit the black dragon anymore?”
The old monster paused and then, slowly, turned his eyes on Leandra. He began to howl a horrible laugher that sounded with one breath hilarity, with the next terror. “It’s you,” he said to Leandra. “The great goulish soul around which we all swivel. Me, your father, our cosang. Every life around, our souls swivel and suffer around you. But I am your slave no more no more.”
Nicodemus was pleased to see that Leandra did not react to the Savanna Walker’s ravings. Rather she kept her eyes fixed on the monster and asked, “Can you become the black dragon again?”
He paused, a leering smile on his lips. “Oh, noooo. Nonono, great soul. Great Los. Diamond demon. I can’t. I am no longer a spell writher, a spell wrighter. She snuffed all magic out of me.” He began his horrible howling laughter again.
Leandra looked over at Nicodemus and asked, “Vivian permanently censored him?”
“Yes, yes!” the Savanna Walker yelled before Nicodemus could reply. “She took her hide-me-spell, the one that has been keeping her fleet unseen. She took it and turned my own illusions inside me. I saw into my own smoke. The way I bent the other minds, so I was bent. She did the anti-dragon thing. She took away my draconicness…”
Leandra asked, “Vivian can deconstruct a dragon?”
“Yesyesyes, you great soggy soul. With the Emerald, that she can do. And you know who’s next?” He leered at Leandra. “Know who’s next? The diamond-minder mother. The mother otherwise. She’ll do the anti-dragon thing to her.”
“Oh,” Leandra said, a rare note of surprise in her voice. “Francesca?”
“They’ll be no thing left of her,” the Savanna Walker snarled. “Like there is no thing left of me. Without the words, I wither away.”
When Nicodemus saw Leandra’s look of confusion he said, “Now that he’s not a spellwright, he’ll die soon.”
“Yes yes, Nicoco.” The Savana Walker whispered. “I dreamed of you. For so long … We’re both caught in the rot. Caught caught in the rot. Around and around we went in this life, maybe the last, maybe the next. Around her.” He showed his teeth at Leandra.
But Leandra was looking at the ceiling as if her thoughts were a thousand miles away.
“James Berr,” Nicodemus said and waited for the old monster to look back at him. “I need you to clearly answer these questions. Can you become the black dragon again? Can you protect us?”
“Oh no, Nicococreaker.”
“What else can you tell us about the Ancient Continent or Los?”
“No no no thing, Nicoco.” Again the laughter. “You have no decision to decide. No more letting me live, huh? It was a missed take before, yes?”
Nicodemus tried to hide his shock that the Savanna Walker should know the purpose of his visit. If he and Leandra had judged the Savanna Walker to be too dangerous, they were going to kill him quickly before the city could lose its soul by using him to save its life. But now … He nodded. “It was a mistake to let you live that night out on the savanna.”
The Savanna Walker hissed. “Yes, I want it quick.”
“I…” Nicodemus started to say but found his resolve faltering.
The Savanna Walker interrupted. “Now you don’t want? Now you don’t know how? Because I want the death. You won’t give it because I want it?” Howling laughter. “You would have murdered my mind if I had wanted to live and eat you all. But now! Ha! Oh, miserable muddy us with the retardation at the end of creation. Now you won’t kill me because I want you to. Retardation at the end of creation. Reetaaaardation…”
Leandra asked, “If he’s permanently censored, how long will he live?”
Nicodemus thought. “It’s impossible to know. Maybe a day, maybe a year, maybe a decade.”
“Is there
any way to know if he’s telling the truth?”
A sudden icy certainty swept through Nicodemus. There was one way. He started to speak but then stopped when he saw the Savanna Walker’s bright green eyes staring at him. Both men were silent. Slowly the Savanna Walker nodded as if he could see what Nicodemus was thinking. Perhaps he could. “Lea,” Nicodemus said, “take the hydromantic lamps out. Leave us in darkness.”
“Are you going to tell me what that overly cryptic statement is about?”
“If he truly is not a spellwright any longer, he will have lost his fluency in Langue Prime. If I touch him—”
“The quick death,” the Savanna Walker said in a low, plaintive tone. “Give it only quick.”
They all stood in silence for a moment. Then Leandra said, “You’re sure, Dad?”
Nicodemus drew a long breath. The Savanna Walker never took his eyes away from his own. “Yes, Lea, take the lamps away.”
Leandra nodded and took the lights into the hallway. When the door slid shut, it dropped them in complete blackness.
Nicodemus could still see the Language Prime in the Savanna Walker’s body. He could tell the Savanna Walker was looking up at him. Then in a soft voice, the ancient and battered man said, “Quick quick … Do this … mercy…”
Then Nicodemus set his hand down on the Savanna Walker’s forearm. Instantly, the other man’s Language Prime misspelled and distorted. A tumor bulged up under Nicodemus’s fingers.
The Savanna Walker was no longer a Language Prime spellwright.
So Nicodemus reached up to a sharply worded paragraph tattooed on his neck. With a quick backhand slash, he cast the words through the skull of his old enemy.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Leandra studied her father as they walked through starlight back to the family compound. Doria and Dhrun followed a few steps behind. Leandra would have said that her father was silent, but that wouldn’t have described half of what was radiating off of him like light. It was a particular kind of silent.
Not all silence is the same, she decided. Silence always has a quality. What a person says, how they say it, such things are what a mind latches on to with labels like witty, cruel, shy. But the quality of someone’s silence reveals so much more about a soul. Thinking back, Leandra could hear in her memory thoughtful silence, tense silence, the implacable silence of death.
If she tried hard enough, Leandra could hear the silence of Thaddeus and Holokai, the void they left. For the rest of her mortal life, Leandra would hear their silence. Perhaps her father was hearing the silence of the Savanna Walker’s death. Perhaps that is why she was so fascinated by him now.
Leandra tried to feel forward in time again, but there were so many different future selves ahead in the next hour that she could draw no conclusions. “Dad,” she said as they walked along Utrana Way.
Nicodemus looked up. He made no sound, and yet he had broken his contemplative silence, replaced it with one of attentiveness.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“I don’t know if I can say, really.”
“Was it about the Savanna Walker?”
“I suppose it was. Something about the choices we make. His cacography led him into so much rage. I…” He looked away. “He could have become so many different people. Maybe it’s the same for me … Maybe he and I weren’t so different.”
“All the different people we could have become but didn’t, what do you suppose happens to them?”
“Maybe they get drunk together in the fiery heaven.” He looked at her, smiling weakly. “What are you thinking?”
She thought about telling him about his silence, her reflection on its nature, but she doubted she could have found the right words. So she said, “About what the Savanna Walker said about Mother.”
“That Vivian will cast her anti-dragon spell, or whatever it is, against Francesca next?”
“I could protect her.”
“Oh, how?”
“With the loveless on, I can break down aspects of divinities. As a dragon, she’s close enough to a divinity that I could remove her draconic aspects without killing her.”
Nicodemus produced a single humorless laugh. “She’ll love to hear that.”
Leandra had to agree. “Do you think it’s true, what the Savanna Walker said about you and him being reincarnated around me?”
“Oh, heaven, who could say? Los was said to be the great destroyer and changer. James Berr and I are cacographers. A goddess once told me that only those things that create a new origin are original, and that there is always something monstrous in a new origin. Maybe the universe works that way. But, truly, who could say?”
“No one,” she agreed. Looking back on the day, Leandra saw how rapidly she was changing. The loveless spell was no longer a refuge for her. It was weakening. She could no longer find the detachment and clarity that had allowed her to take such outrageous action. “You asked me if I had any … deeper … sense of what truly was happening,” she said slowly. “It seems to me that we are all moving along cycles. That we imagine our choices lead to different types of cycles. The empire or the league. We think that each is going to produce a different future, a different history, but in fact we are trapped in the same cycle. If anything is going to change…” Her voice trailed off as she suddenly became unsure.
“Going to change, Lea?”
“I’m sorry. It was a vague sensation, came and went.” She was staring up now at the volcano’s dark silhouette. As she had before, she thought of all the textual energy stored in the crater lake and wished there were some way she could tap into it.
“Lea?”
She blinked, realized that Nicodemus had just said something. They were now standing in front of their compound.
“I’m sorry,” she said as several guards let them into the pavilion. “I was distracted.”
“Lea,” her father said as they climbed the stairs, “I wish I could make you see how great a role you could play in the world’s course. I know you don’t see a difference between the league and empire, but if you survive, you will become the league and can improve it. You will become the engine of change.”
Dhrun also reached the top of the steps and moved into the dark hallway ahead. Doria headed off to her quarters.
Leandra was shaking her head at her father. “The bloodiest history comes by those who think they are breaking the world for the better.” She laughed. “Hell, in my last life, I tried to extinguish humanity. My record doesn’t exactly inspire optimism.”
“You aren’t bound to become anything in this life.”
“How do you know, Dad? I’ve killed a man and a god in the past two days. I poisoned you.”
“You paralyzed me to save me.”
“You have to think that because I’m your daughter.”
“Does that mean I’m wrong? Just … think about it, will you?”
“But what if you’re wrong—”
A ragged scream cut off her sentence. Motion blurred at the corner of her vision. Leandra tried to spin around but slipped on the top stair and fell. Looking up, she saw Dhrun. One pair of his arms were drawing the sword on his left hip; the other pair, the sword on his right. But though his muscles bunched with inhuman speed, they produced no motion.
Thick black branches had entwined his scabbard and hands. They punched long thorns into his flesh, sending rivulets of blood down his lungi. The ragged scream came from Rory, who was jamming his hands into Dhrun’s chest, pushing him up and back, trying to press the god against the railing. Though Dhrun’s thighs bulged underneath his lungi, he had been caught off balance. He tottered backward.
In a moment of vivid recall, Leandra saw Dhrun knocking the Lornish knight over this same railing. She remembered Rory bending over the knight’s corpse.
Now Rory’s druidic robes were disheveled. The branches were springing from his wooden plate armor, which was more draped around than strapped to him. His long auburn hair fell over an expression
of intoxicated rage.
Nicodemus was yelling at Rory to stop, stepping closer to him and then jumping back, afraid that his touch would misspell Dhrun’s divine language or Rory’s Language Prime. Something glass broke against Rory’s chest and water ran down the two combatants. As Leandra struggled to her feet, she realized it was one of a Doria’s glass vials. But the dispelling aqueous texts only froze the bloody branches in place around Dhrun.
Leandra took a step toward the struggle and pain leapt up her leg. She had to catch herself against the wall. Then she noticed Rory’s expression.
It was a mixture of hatred and longing distorted by … what was it? Had he been drinking? Just then she remembered Doria’s statement that the man had been so heartbroken that she’d given him something to help him sleep. Now the drugs and heartbreak and rage were boiling through the man.
For a stunned moment, Leandra studied Rory’s face with the fascination of a chemist watching some novel spirit distill in an alembic.
Roots sprouted from the floorboards and wrapped around Rory’s legs, stabilizing and pushing him forward. Dhrun tottered backward. His hip hit the railing, and he began to tip. Dhrun turned his head one way and then another. Leandra caught his expression, its great pain and its struggle.
Leandra struggled forward, ignoring the pain in her leg. It was clear enough what had to be done: she’d deconstruct Rory’s every text and, if needed, appropriate aspects of Dhrun to subdue the druid.
But then Leandra met Dhrun’s eyes and time slowed. Air seemed syruplike. She realized, a moment too late, that Dhrun had been fighting to stop Rory, but now he was fighting to stop himself.
Rory’s mouth twisted into a rictus of anguish, of murder. He lunged into a last shove. But as Dhrun began to tilt over the railing, his expression slackened. His eyes burned with light as blank as the sun’s. All aspects of his expression that had come from young handsome Dhrunarman or wise old Nika dissolved. His eyes burned pitilessly bright. Scintillating white light danced around his body. This was the true incarnation of Dhrun, the North Star, He Who Could Not Be Moved.
Spellbreaker Page 45