Spellbreaker
Page 54
Nicodemus tensed and Francesca prayed he would keep his mouth shut. The Trimuril’s spider voice creaked in her ear, “If we undid your gag, would you talk to him? He’ll only get himself killed.”
Francesca was about to nod when a subtle movement caught her eye. She thought she saw Ellen and Leandra exchange what seemed, impossibly, a conspiratorial glance.
Then without warning, Leandra burst free of her Magnus bonds. With two quick steps, she reached out and grasped Tagrana’s shoulder. The tiger goddess snapped out of existence like a popped soap bubble.
Ellen cast a spray of silvery paragraphs that shot across the room to the tightly rolled silk curtains above each of the throne room’s windows. The cords holding each snapped and the curtains fell. The room fell into almost complete darkness.
Francesca’s heart raced. Everyone was screaming. There sounded the almost simultaneous twang of three crossbows being loosed.
Francesca’s bonds snapped. Icy shock filled her head as her mind was restored to magic. The hands on her back disappeared and there was the sound of a body hitting the floor.
All around her the screaming continued. Francesca struggled to her feet. A sudden bloom of light appeared on the dais. Francesca turned and saw the empress casting a Numinous spell. She was surrounded by wizardly and hierophantic guards, one of whom was Cyrus. They were trying to usher the empress away. Behind her, hydromancers had swarmed around the regent.
Then the empress cast her bright spell. It flew in a smooth arc to where Nicodemus had been standing. At first Francesca could not understand what she was seeing. There was neither tigroid constructs nor the goddess Tagrana. On the ground lay a man. He was stripped to the waist. Three crossbow bolts protruded from him: one from his shoulder, a second from his chest, and a third from his left eye.
When she recognized his olive skin and long black hair, Francesca cried out pure anguish.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
As the dying god lay motionless, Nicodemus realized the deity was maintaining his incarnation as long as possible. But crimson light was already seeping from his crossbow bolt wounds. There wasn’t much time left.
As before, when Nicodemus had split from the dying god, he had suffered disorienting amnesia; however, because Nicodemus had been awake and watched the dying god’s injury, the shock restored his memory. He had cast a shadowganger spell upon himself and stepped into the crowd on the dais. He had played this game of concealment before.
As he slipped between the imperial spellwrights, Nicodemus prayed to the dying god, hoping it would help the suffering deity survive just a little longer.
Francesca was screaming. Those on the dais who were not hustling the Sacred Regent away or protecting the empress were staring at Francesca, hypnotized by the agony pouring out of her.
Then Nicodemus stepped around a pyromancer and stood not ten feet from his half-sister. In the dying god’s red glow, he could see Vivian in perfect detail.
Like him, she still stood an inch over six feet. Like his, her glossy black hair was now filigreed with silver. Age had softened her dark olive features without dimming the intensity of her green eyes. The empress stared at Francesca while holding the Emerald of Arahest.
A soft light grew within the Emerald, and the scar on Nicodemus’s back felt hot. He had tried years ago to give the Emerald away, to diminish its power, but the world would not let it be so. Now he would take back the Emerald to subdue his half-sister and save his daughter. He could feel the Emerald’s longing for reunion. This had happened before when he had confronted Fellwroth and then Typhon. He had been little more than a child then. This time would be different. The Emerald’s absence had defined him, but now he had to redefine himself. Now he would make things right.
As Nicodemus took a step closer, Vivian raised her hand and cast two cylindrical paragraphs of golden prose. Floating in the air above her, the cylinders fit together and began to spin in opposite directions. In the next moment, the spell would blaze with brilliant white light and burn away the dark spells that kept Nicodemus invisible.
He pulled a tattooed paragraph from his thigh and edited it into a blunt wall of force. With a quick backhand he cast the luminous indigo passage at Vivian. He pulled a long spell from his bicep and cast it after the first.
White light was just beginning to glow in Vivian’s Numinous spell when the indigo text struck her in the chest, knocked her backward. At the same time, Nicodemus’s indigo sentence wrapped around the Emerald. He pulled the spell taut and the Emerald leapt out of Vivian’s hand, broke free of its silver chain and flew back toward him.
Everything but the gem melted away for Nicodemus. The instant his skin made contact with the Emerald, he could write spells of infinite complexity. Neither sunlight nor the spellwrights bustling about the dais could stop him. He held his hand out and prepared for the reunion of his mind.
That was why he was filled with such profound shock when a lithe hand appeared not a foot before his own and plucked the Emerald out of his spell.
* * *
As Leandra closed her fingers around the Emerald of Arahest, an immense sadness filled her. She had succeeded. There could be no doubt. An hour from now, every one of her future selves felt an array of emotions beyond human comprehension. Knowing this increased the weight of her sadness. Some part of her had been hoping for failure. But now it was too late.
Now that she possessed the Emerald, Leandra became a spellwright in every magical language her father and aunt had studied. Quickly, she deconstructed the subtext that was concealing her father.
He stared at her, lips parted slightly, trying to figure out how it was she was standing in front of him. It must seem impossible to him. In fact, she had simply deconstructed the tiger goddess and her three tigerlike warriors, stolen their strength and wide feline eyes. Those attributes had made following her father and taking the Emerald from his spell as simple as stealing a bauble from a baby.
Someone cast a Magnus wartext at Leandra. It was a coiling of sharp silvery words, vicious enough to mangle a god. Leandra casually broke it into a blunt coruscation. The attacking author stood only a few feet away, staring at her with wide eyes. When Leandra recognized him as Lotannu Akomma, she smiled and cast a quick censoring net around his mind.
Next Leandra cast a few sharp silver words at the curtains behind the throne. Her spells tore through silk. The curtains fell to let a square of sunlight fall on her.
The shocking brightness silenced every mouth, turned every eye toward her. Leandra regarded the hierophants and pyromancers around the empress and the hydromancers protecting the Sacred Regent. For a moment, she thought they would be wise enough to stay an attack. But then a pyromancer reached into a scroll to pull out an incendiary sentence.
Through the Emerald, Leandra wrote a horde of Numinous disspells and sent them flying down through the muscles of her legs. With a stomp, she sent a shockwave of golden prose radiating out from her, dispelling every text in the room. She had written the disspells to avoid her mother, Dhrun, and the Trimuril. But any other deity unlucky or unwise enough to be in the throne room would be textually mangled. Spellwrights fluent in Numinous cried out. Others flinched or grimaced as their spells deconstructed in their hands.
Leandra stood perfectly still in the pool of sunlight.
“By imperial order, attack tha—” Aunt Vivian started to shout, but with a wave of her hand, Leandra cast a sphere of sound-deadening text around the empress.
Lotannu and several other imperial spellwrights stepped toward the text but stopped when Leandra said, quite clearly but without any particularly emphasis. “Don’t.”
Stillness returned to the room. Leandra looked down from the dais at her mother and Dhrun behind her. “Come up,” she said and motioned beside her. The two stared at her for a moment but then Dhrun gestured to Francesca and slowly they climbed the steps up to the dais.
“Father,” Leandra said.
Slowly Nicodemus approached.
She had no doubt an angry crimson bloom was spreading across her face. “It’s all right, Dad,” she said before turning to the crowd and raising her voice. “You must all listen to me, and you must listen carefully. The world will depend on you for the truth of what is about to happen.”
“Lea, what—” her father started to protest.
But she looked at him and he fell silent. Maybe he could see the determination and sadness in her eyes.
When she spoke again, it was with the clarity and detachment that comes with finally saying what one has known but could not articulate for a very long time. “The world we have lived in, despite its poverty, is a decorated one. It is rich with pain. To me, it has long been a prison built by the past and maintained by the powerful. Every one of us here has been a prison guard to this world. We have maintained the divisions between league and empire, spellwrights and illiterates, humans and divinities, wealthy and destitute. We live and play in inequity; it makes our delights grotesque and our miseries sympathetic.”
Leandra paused as her mother and Dhrun stood beside her father. She continued. “I speak to you not as someone who did any better with her life. I have known grotesque delight in this world, in its beauty, in the souls who haunt it. I have been a lover and I have been a murderer. When you tell the world of me, do not forget my frailty or my anger or my sadness. Tell the world all of these things and tell them that I was the one who changed the words, that I am the one who made them rewrite both the misery and the delight.”
Leandra tried to slow down but the words tumbled out of her. “Soon you will have to hurry away. You will be buffeted by great force. Some of you may die or kill each other.” Fearful voices began to rise. “Those who survive, those who return to the city I loved, you will find the world changed.”
She raised her voice, made it ring out. “I tell you these things as Leandra Weal, who both hated and loved this world, who was a child tortured by disease and a woman of great privilege. I tell you these things as the Dread Goddess Los, who destroyed the last world and who will destroy this one. The spell we have cast upon this world must be broken.”
The throne room erupted into shouts and a confusion of bodies as some ran for the doors and others launched themselves into attacks. Leandra deconstructed every spell cast at her and then flicked walls of text at the attacking authors.
“Go now! Run!” Leandra yelled. “Get to dry land and the city. Tell the world what I have told you. You must rewrite the world.” Everyone in the crowd had turned to flee, empress and regent among them.
The pain in Leandra’s gut twisted like a parasite.
“Lea, what’s going on?” her father asked even as her mother said, “You’re out of your God-of-god’s damned mind!”
Leandra could not suppress a rueful smile at their characteristic reactions. Then she grimaced.
“This is a trick, right?” Francesca said in a lower tone. “Some way of scaring away the empress?”
Leandra shook her head. “No trick. I have to leave you soon.”
“Lea, stop this,” Francesca said, clearly afraid.
“I can’t, not any longer.” Then the pain reached up through her. She gasped, went momentarily blind.
Then somehow she was lying on her back, looking up at her parents and Dhrun. She reached out to the goddess. “Dhru,” she whispered, “I’m so sorry we never had a chance, but with the next dragon, you—” Another spasm shut her eyes.
When she opened them, her mother was examining her belly while Dhrun held one of her hands and her father the other.
Leandra smiled at her father. “You’re going to hate being grandparents.” Then she laughed because probably they wouldn’t hate it at all.
“She’s delirious,” her mother said with medicinal concern.
This made Leandra laugh harder until the blinding pain wrenched through her again. She gasped.
When she could focus again, Leandra felt her father’s hand on her cheek. He spoke in a ragged voice. “Lea, it doesn’t have to be like this.”
She shook her head and pushed herself further into her disease flare. “You need to go, Dad. Get…” Another spasm of pain. “Get Mom and Dhrun to shore.”
“Lea, not like this,” her father pleaded. “Not like this. Don’t leave us…”
“I … Daddy, I have to.” It was getting difficult to see. The center of her vision became a patch of blackness.
Then her mother was close. “Lea, stop this right now. I can see the language you’re written in. Stop it, Lea. Please, please, stop it.”
Then Leandra understood. Of course, her parents weren’t stupid. The Emerald was amplifying the effect of her disease flare; already her parents were fluent in her crimson magical language.
Leandra smiled and tried to take her parents’ hands, but she could not feel her hands anymore. “The change,” she said, “make sure they all know about the change.”
“What change?” her father asked somewhere above her.
“You’ll see…” she said and then gasped again as the pain shoved its way through her chest. She clenched her teeth and tried to breathe. With great difficulty she said, “Make them write it all … new.”
Her consciousness expanded. She felt her mother’s nails digging into her palm. She could hear her onetime lover’s heartbeat. She became a two-ton bell far up in the Floating Palace as a priest struck it to warn the Floating City of crisis. She was the sound that came off the bell’s shivering metal. She was the sound as it vibrated down through wooden beams to the dark, cool water of the crater lake.
Dimly she became aware of her parents crying above her body. Briefly she was the salt in a tear—whose she couldn’t tell, perhaps her own.
But then her consciousness projected downward into the lake. She was a dark and ancient fish flicking its fins through crystalline currents. Her mind expanded into the aqueous spells that the hydromancers had been pouring into the crater lake for a thousand years. Leandra became every last magical rune in that wide body of water. She was the greatest reserve of energy yet created by humanity. In the last act of her life, Leandra used her mortal talent to transform that reserve of power and make it rise up.
The waters of the crater lake began to churn and to shine. Slowly at first but then with gathering violence, the waters flowed around creating a mile-wide whirlpool.
Leandra’s parents and her onetime lover emerged from the Floating Palace. Her own limp body lay in her father’s arms.
Her parents ran along a pontooned bridge. But the whirlpool was spinning faster now. The pageantry of floating craft was dragged around and around in a chaos of wood and rope. The bridges broke apart. Her parents and her lover fell into the churning blue.
And then, the transformation of the energy complete, the language of the lake erupted as a blazing glory of light.
Leandra had become that eruption, a force of violence and permanent change. She blasted up the volcano’s crater and high into the sky. She had become a metaspell more powerful than any yet imagined. The wind caught and blew her in a thousand different directions.
Part of her settled upon the beautiful and disgusting city of Chandralu. Leandra became the fish wives and goddesses and lovers and thieves. Part of her was blown across a bay and then across an archipelago where she became the farmers and children and murderers and healers and ghosts and gods of the archipelago.
Out across the ocean she spread to a kingdom of arid plains and deserts. And she was every kind of soul spreading herself farther and farther east from tiny homesteads to glorious adobe cities vibrant with the lives of millions.
And down the peninsula she swept, over waving grass, and she became lycanthropes and kobolds and hierophants in their wind gard
ens. And farther south she spread and wrapped herself around the shell of an ancient city made into a wizardly academy. And, for a moment, she swirled more tightly around this place where once her father had been a crippled boy. In the nearby forests, there were ghosts of an extinct people who stirred in their dark recesses and shuddered when they realized that the change her father had begun had come to fruition.
And then Leandra sped over snowy mountains to a kingdom filled with rain and cathedrals and farmers and smiths and seraphs. And then she passed into a kingdom of ancient forests and druids and hunters and vast orchards and secluded groves.
Having reached the end of the human lands and having touched every soul, the metaspell that Leandra had become was blown north again over the sea and toward the volcano from which she sprang.
And so it was that Leandra’s soul dissipated itself across the great circle of the world into a single, precise change.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
In death a body acquires a peculiar weight. It wants to go to ground. In defiance of living arms that haul and lift, a corpse flops and lolls. When moving together, the living and the dead make an awkward dance—one that Francesca had seen too many times. That was why, when she saw the way Nicodemus was pulling Leandra onto the rocky lakeshore, she knew that her daughter was dead.
Nicodemus and Leandra were both facing out toward the wreckage that was the Floating City. He had slipped his arms under hers to haul her by the chest. Her head and arms hung limply as he took backward steps up the shore. His sandaled foot slipped on a rock and together they crumpled. His face twisted into an agony that had nothing to do with the rock bruising his back.
Francesca had come out of the water a few hundred feet away. She had been picking her way along the rocky shore, looking with rising panic for her husband and daughter. Now that she saw them, she could not move. Her body seemed a prison, her heart a hollow space. But then Dhrun touched her arm. Out in the whirlpool, the goddess had helped Francesca stay afloat until the force of the water had pushed a boat between them. Later, Dhrun had come out of the water only a few feet away from Leandra.