Spellbreaker

by Blake Charlton

  He paused to shift his weight. “On the last Bright Souls Night I ever spent in my village … when I was seventeen … they had the best wrestlers for five villages come to our festival. None of them could push me out. When the festival ended, and they put the crown of ferns on my head, my mother came up to me, crying like someone had just died. She told me that everyone in the village had contributed to make a tournament prize. Everyone knew I was going to win, so they had donated rupees to send me to Chandralu. That’s when I realized that my mother was crying because they were sending me away from her. Of course I couldn’t understand. I was angry with her, I think. Not fair that I was, but I was. I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t happy for me. I thought she was being a foolish old woman and that I’d see her whenever I came back from the city.”

  Leandra studied his face as he looked off into the bay. “And you haven’t seen her?”

  “My first year in the city was rough. The older wrestlers with more experience all had the drop on me. I was cheated and robbed. I slept on the street more often than not and was too ashamed to send word back. But a couple of the other wrestlers took pity on me and showed me some moves. By year’s end, I was winning enough matches to live under a roof. I sent a few messages home and a few rupees. But before I traveled back to that tiny town, I wanted to be successful, somebody my village could be proud about. I won a few smaller tournaments, but it always seemed as if I should win just one more match before I went back. Things changed though when I got involved in the blood sport and the cult of Dhrun.”

  “Life got more complicated?”

  “That’s one way to put it. It was frightening and thrilling. There was death and kava and wine and criminals and beautiful women. I was twenty years old before I thought to travel home. It had been half a year since my last message from home. So I sent out a message and started to make travel plans, but the word came back that in the rainy season, a flood had destroyed the village’s irrigation system. All the crops had failed and the entire village had been abandoned. No one knew what happened to my family. I hired several messengers to search for them but never heard back. I don’t know if they looked or just pocketed my money.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Half a year later, a distant cousin recognized me in a wrestling match. Afterward he told me that my father and uncle tried to take the family to another village farther inland. But when they got there, they found it filled with similar refugee peasants. My father and uncle decided to try the fishing villages by the coast. But on the road, bandits led by some wild boar neodemon robbed them and killed my uncle. By the time the survivors reached the fishing village, they were starving. When mother fell ill, my father was caught stealing. The villagers ran my family away. No one ever knew what happened to my father, but my mother died a few days later.”

  Leandra didn’t say anything. What was there to say? These stories were too common during the lean years. She wished Dhrun would look at her but he kept his eyes on the bay and the catamarans making slow and graceful turns. She reached over and took his hand.

  Their fingers interlaced.

  “What did you do?”

  He smiled then, tightly. “Got drunk. Very drunk. Night after night. I took chances in the arena I had no right to walk away from. It hurt that I had waited. And the more I hated myself, the more chances I took in the arena. That’s when Dhrun took me on as a lesser avatar. The year that followed was a bloody blur. Dhrun invested most of his soul into me. There was so much … so much of everything: blood, kava, wine, women, silver rupees, gold rupees. It was like a dream and a nightmare. It was only when Nika convinced us to form a divinity complex that the madness stopped. She saved us. Well, she did and you did.”

  She squeezed his hand. “How’s that?”

  This time his smile was warmer. “When I saw you take down that pickpocket air goddess in the arena—by then I was a trinity but part of me that was a young man and … well … young men can fall rather hard for impressive and beautiful women. Then, when it turned out that you had a cause I could believe in—and my family had been pushed into their end by a neodemon bandit—it gave me a purpose.”

  Leandra nodded.

  “It helped me stop beating myself up for not going back to my village sooner. We think so often about our abilities, about how in the future we’re going to be something brighter than we are now … but it’s not true, having greater ability doesn’t make happiness more uplifting or success more fulfilling. Pain and joy are what they are, no matter.”

  “Very philosophical.”

  His dark brown eyes peered into hers. “I don’t want you to feel sorry for me.”

  “I don’t—”

  “I saw your expression out on the street, and I don’t want you pitying me or torturing yourself because you had to deconstruct part of me. I am not nearly as powerful, and maybe I’m not useful to you anymore, but out there in that ring, I proved that I can get by. I can win enough prayers to survive. And I still have”—he started to say something but then seemed to change his mind—“something of a cause.”

  She laughed and looked away. “And what cause would that be? Because if your referring the idea of the Undivided Society, it’s dead now that—”

  “Lea, if you need to be forgiven, I forgive you.”

  She laughed while turning back to him but then felt her heart collapse. In his earnest expression she saw Holokai, Thaddeus, Tenili. “You’re being sentimental. You don’t know what you’re … God-of-gods damn it!” This last she swore as her eyes began to sting. She yanked her hands from his and gave her eyes an angry rub.

  Dhrun said nothing, which was fortunate as she might have deconstructed his face off if he’d spoken. He waited until she finished rubbing her eyes. Then she angrily jammed her hand onto his and interlaced their fingers. If he was going to be affectionate and supportive, then he was going to have to be affectionate and supportive on her terms, damn it.

  But when he waited patiently as she stared out at the bay and then gave her hand a gentle squeeze, her heart collapsed again and tears burned into her eyes.

  She turned to him and felt his arms encircle her. She felt his warmth. She thought about all that she had done and all that she had lost. She thought of the disease burning through her. “We break so many things,” she found herself blurting. “Everything’s broken and I don’t know…”

  Then she was crying, no longer thinking in words but in the primal colors of heartbreak. He held her, gently rocked her. After what felt like an eternity, Leandra found that she had no more tears or self-hatred or regrets, as if her weeping had hollowed out a rotten core.

  “Thank you,” she mumbled into his chest. She slipped her arms around him, pulled him close and mashed her face against his blouse. She’d already ruined it with tears and snot, she was sure, so best to try to get the remaining snot and tears off her face.

  He continued to hold her. She prayed then to Nika and the glory of small victories. It wasn’t much, she knew, but the next time Dhrun won some match, he would get a small amount of the strength he was giving her now.

  Dhrun asked, “When did you take the loveless spell off?”

  “Ellen did it for me, just before I found you. It’s in the book on the bed.” She gestured without removing her face from his chest.

  “Thank you for taking it off.”

  She nodded into him. “I hope I don’t get a disease flare.”

  “I hope so too.”

  He continued to hold her. She continued to lean into him. “How could you tell?”

  “It’s not hard to tell.”

  A thrill ran up her then. She knew what he meant, what she could not give him with the loveless around her mind and what she was giving him now in return for what he gave her.

  When she looked up then it was to be kissed, and she had no sooner opened her eyes than he gently pressed his lips to hers. She closed her eyes again and allowed her consciousness to experience him as both a living bo
dy and an expanse of prose.

  They stood like that for a long time, for what felt to her like too long. In her impatience, she pulled at him harder. Their kiss became something more. Then he was lifting her up and spinning her around and she pulled on him harder, almost fighting him.

  They fell on the bed, accidently pulling the mosquito net down. He pulled off her blouse. She tore his down the front. She wriggled out of her lungi, and he out of his. And then … And then …

  Afterward, exhausted and filled with relief, she lay with her head on his chest. “I don’t know why,” she said while catching her breath, “we waited until you had only two arms to do that.”

  He laughed and held her tighter while their breath slowed. They were both sweating in the humidity and it didn’t matter. He stroked her back with the slowing rhythm of one falling toward sleep. She wanted to make fun of him for it but felt her exhausted heart dragging her down into sleep. She fought it for a moment but then gave in.

  She felt herself become aware of his every sentence, of every curve of his body. Then, unexpectedly, she became aware of the weaving of the mosquito net below her and the few hovering insects above them.

  Like a river surging out into the open ocean, her consciousness expanded and she became the wind blowing over the compound and through a banyan tree so that its every branch swung in a different direction. She became a cook pinching a cut finger. On the bay, she was a sailor watching for enemies. In the alleys behind the market, she was a troop of thieving monkeys impatiently waiting.

  Out and out Leandra’s perception stretched, and she was only dimly aware that she was suffering a vicious disease flare. Vaguely she remembered that she still wore the prophetic godspell and that she had prayed to Nika, both of which predisposed her to disease flares.

  She was the rubble lying in a civic stream; a flock of red-and-green parrots rising and wheeling; a boy crying at his mother’s cremation. In the Nauka, she was a beggar searching the body of someone killed by yesterday’s cannon fire. In the Banyan District, she was an imperial spy casting pyromantic texts about a building. Leandra was the city. Leandra was no longer breathing.

  Mortal fear churned within her as she realized that the only thing that could now contain this disease flare was the loveless spell written in a book that lay on the floor next to her bed. The nearest spellwright who could cast the loveless onto Leandra was her mother.

  There would have been hope for her if Dhrun were a Numinous spellwright and if he could realize that her mind was expanded because of the flare. But Dhrun was lying underneath her falling toward sleep. He stirred slightly, perhaps unconsciously disturbed by her stillness, but even so he did not wake.

  Then Leandra knew that the situation had escaped her control and was filled with an unexpected sense of relief. It was over. So she turned her attention to becoming as much of the city that she loved as was possible before she died.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  After casting his metaspell from the Pavilion of the Sky, Nicodemus watched as one wave of Language Prime rolled down Mount Jalavata while other wave was caught by the wind and began to billow into the sky.

  Nicodemus’s cacography prevented him from writing many kinds of spells, but it enabled him to cast unique metaspells, which were truly metamisspells that caused magical language to become more creatively chaotic and intuitive.

  As his metaspell spread, it would incorporate itself into every human or divinity it touched, strengthening the bond between humanity and intuitive magical language. In turn, this would strengthen the ark-stone system of transforming prayer into divine text. For more than fifty days, all affected humans and deities would unknowingly reproduce Nicodemus’s metaspell. Like an epidemic, his metaspell would spread across the archipelago.

  Exhausted, Nicodemus sat down. Perched on the eastern lip of Mount Jalavata’s crater, the pavilion afforded views of the open ocean and the Bay of Standing Islands.

  The pavilion was a three-story, hexagonal structure that was no more than twenty paces in diameter. Nicodemus sat on the top floor, which consisted only of six slender pillars and an ornately carved wooden roof. The first two stories were built of stone and housed a rotating trinity of priests who spent their time contemplating the Trimuril’s Araxa manifestation. As one of the holiest places in the Cloud Culture, the pavilion hosted pilgrims who hiked up from the Floating City.

  On arrival, Nicodemus discovered the recent imperial attack had doubled the usual number of pilgrims. They had lined up outside the pavilion to greet him with prayer. Nicodemus had exhorted them to pray for, and not to, him. But likely they would disobey and Nicodemus’s dying god would soon be reincarnated.

  A burst of wind sent Nicodemus’s hair streaming. Taming it, he wondered if there was more silver amid the black than he had had two days ago. Strange that aging always seemed a mild surprise; some part of him was affronted that he was no longer twenty-five and just embarking on manhood. But he’d been miserable at twenty-five. Why should part of his heart hold on to that?

  He looked down at the Pavilion’s base and saw that his hydromancer guards and the two potbellied war gods had taken up defensive positions.

  Another gust blew through the pillars. A wave of uncertainty about his daughter made Nicodemus pause and look down at Chandralu. Could he be mistaken about her? He thought of Rory and Sir Claude. He needed more time with his daughter to discover who she truly was. If only there was some way of holding back Vivian’s forces. Idly he scratched his keloid and wondered if it would have any effect on the Emerald or Vivian.

  He turned toward the stairs and got a gust of wind in the face. As he had when hiking up, Nicodemus wondered if there was some Ixonian god of the winds to whom he could pray. And then, at the top of the stairs, he froze as a thought blew through his mind.

  “Trimuril,” he said to himself, then louder, “Trimuril! Trimuril!” He went back to the railing and looked westward into the wind. “Goddess, Trimuril!”

  “Yes, yes, what is it? What happened?” Ancestor Spider creaked with annoyance into his ear.

  “Thank heaven you heard me!”

  “What, you think I wouldn’t maintain a presence in a pavilion dedicated to Ancestor Spider?”

  “Is there an Ixonian deity of wind? Someone to whom the sailors or merchants pray to make their ships sail faster?”

  “The Vatayana divinity complex, of course. Why?”

  “We need to get word to Chandralu. They have to stop praying for anti-cannon deities.”

  “But—”

  “Just briefly. I’ve figured out what they must pray for.”

  “Well,” Ancestor Spider creaked in his ear, “you had better tell me quickly. Your half-sister is coming to pay us another visit.”

  Nicodemus looked out at the bay. To the north, a fleet of dark war galleys and white airships was sailing toward Chandralu with incredible speed.

  * * *

  Leandra gasped, convulsed. The world seemed too dark and too bright. Her heart beat as if it had wings. Every instinct cried out for air. She wanted to expand her chest infinitely, to inhale the sky.

  She was lying naked on the floor. Dhrun, naked and male, was holding her and saying something. But she couldn’t hear anything but her breath, which she took in and let out with growing pleasure. She closed her eyes. The world spun and her hands and feet tingled. She became aware of her body, of the day’s heat, of Dhrun murmuring “Lea, Lea, Lea,” as if in prayer.

  At last Leandra understood. She tried to sit up.

  Dhrun’s tearstained expression creased into a paroxysm of what might have been pain or relief. Maybe both. But in the next moment, composure settled across his features. He helped her sit up and she noticed the opened spellbook by his knee.

  “How?”

  “You weren’t breathing,” he said while mashing the tears from his face with the back of his wrist. “I tried waking you. I even slapped you like Holokai would, but nothing worked. We fell off the bed and that’s w
hen I saw the book.”

  “But you’re not a Numinous spellwright.”

  “In your fit you somehow made me fluent in Numinous. I saw the spell and I knew how it worked, so I cast it on you.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. I wasn’t touching Numinous text and there was no active Numinous spell near me.”

  “Lea, I don’t know and I don’t care.”

  Becoming more acutely aware of their nudity, Leandra searched among the sheets for her clothes.

  “Lea, with the loveless on…”

  She looked at him. He was sitting on his knees, looking both beautiful and vaguely pathetic in his nudity. “Yes,” she said, “what I can feel now is different, but I do remember.” She reached over and grasped his hand briefly before she stood and tied her lungi.

  Dhrun began to dress as well. Something about watching the shape of his shoulder as it moved through simple motions made her thoughts unspool. She remembered more vividly than ever before what it had been like to become the city. She thought of all the different things she had been: the wind, the grieving child, the cloud of colorful parrots. Something had changed when she had given herself to the dissipation of her consciousness … It was …

  “Are you okay?”

  She blinked. “Yes, of course.”

  “You looked like you might stop breathing again.”

  She shook her head. “There’s something different…” Then, as she pulled on her blouse, she realized that she had not been paying attention to her prophetic godspell. Since returning to consciousness, she had felt a knot of raw fear. Mistakenly, she had attributed it to how close she had come to death, but in fact almost all of her future selves were terrified. “Dhru! The imperial spy! I was—”