Spellwright

by Blake Charlton

  There was only one explanation: contact with his cacographic mind had filled the Index with misspellings.

  It didn’t matter, Nicodemus told himself, pressing a hand to his chest. He had intended to steal the artifact anyway.

  But the fear building in his mind would not be ignored. Stealing an artifact was a serious crime, and wizards despised nothing more than the destruction of a magical artifact. If they discovered him now, they would permanently censor magical literacy from his mind. Worse, their hatred for him and for all cacographers would multiply a hundredfold. He would become the most infamous misspeller since James Berr had killed those wizards so long ago.

  “Calm yourself,” Nicodemus said slowly. Perhaps only this document was misspelled. It was written nearly four hundred years ago. Maybe the spellings were different then.

  Intending to find Magister Shannon’s most recent treatise on spell intelligence, Nicodemus reached out and turned a page. With deep trepidation, he read:

  From Concatenation’s Effects on Secondary Cognition in Semi-Atonomous Nonsense amp; Antisense Numinous Disspells, by Agwu Shannon.

  Resent spell inteligence research has focused on the nessesity of imbuing an aspect of the caster’s consciousness…

  As he read the last word, Nicodemus groaned and shut his eyes. How could this be? Maybe, he thought, maybe the magical texts hadn’t been affected. Maybe contact with his mind had only misspelled the mundane texts.

  Nicodemus pressed his palm to the page and thought of a spell called “touch.” He chose touch because it possessed such a simple, straightforward rune sequence that he would be able to tell if the version contained within the Index was misspelled.

  Just as a fisherman’s hook yanks an unsuspecting trout from the river, the Index plucked Nicodemus’s mind from the wetness within his skull and sent it sailing into a vast and airy space.

  It took a moment for him to perceive his new surroundings. Here Nicodemus had no eyes, no body. There was no up, no down. Everything was darkness.

  Nicodemus’s surprise turned to fear. The blackness became heavy and thick, like humid air. He struggled to free himself but could not. He wanted to scream but had no lungs; he wanted to run but had no legs.

  At last he forced himself to relax. Slowly, his mind opened to the strange new world. Tiny glimmers moved all around him. They grew brighter and became glowing gems that hung as if suspended from invisible tree limbs.

  His vision became sharper and suddenly it was as if he were floating in the night sky. The luminescent orbs had become stars of different shapes and colors. Some blazed with fierce emerald radiation; others glowed indigo or ivory so dimly that they disappeared when he looked directly at them.

  At last he realized that this black firmament was the world within the Index. Now he became aware of his body, swaying somewhere far below on the floor. The realization brought on a wave of vertigo and twisted his face into a grimace.

  Back inside the Index, stars of silver and gold appeared. Nicodemus’s perception of the book’s night sky was rapidly improving; within moments he could see for untold miles. The starry array stretched endlessly away.

  Suddenly he realized what he was looking at. These were not stars, but spells. His vision confirmed it. He was staring through the Index at every text contained within Starhaven.

  He must be thinking through the spells attached to the Index; he was having quaternary thoughts. It was a glorious, dreamlike feeling. But his elation faded as he remembered why he had entered the Index in the first place.

  He needed to find the touch spell.

  A white star flashed brighter and began to speed toward him like a comet. An instant later, the spell crashed into him with a soundless explosion.

  Removing his hand from the Index made Nicodemus’s mind drop like a lightning bolt back into his head. He blinked. Returning to the bony confines of his skull was intensely uncomfortable. He shook his head and felt his ideas slosh around like seaweed.

  “Oh… yuck!” he said.

  Gradually his mind molded itself to his skull. And he found that he could think clearly again.

  A new knowledge of the simple touch spell was now inside of him. The spell’s primary sequence burned before his eyes as clearly as if he had just written it out a thousand times. But some of the runes were out of order-he knew because touch was one of the few spells simple enough that he had memorized its proper spelling.

  Now he was sure: contact with his mind had misspelled one of the Order’s most prized artifacts.

  Nicodemus put his hands to his face. “No… no…” he whimpered. Shame and guilt throbbed behind his eyes. He would forever be known as the cacographer who had destroyed Starhaven’s most valuable artifact.

  “Wait!” he sputtered. “Wait.” There was one last hope. Perhaps if he could repair his disabled mind, he could repair the Index. “Show me,” he ordered the Index, “any mundane documents relating to curing cacography.”

  As the book began flipping pages, Nicodemus looked up and muttered a prayer to Hakeem. When the Index stopped, he took a deep breath and looked down, ready to read.

  But the page was blank.

  Breath spilled out of Nicodemus. His cacography had destroyed the Index. Maybe he’d vomit again.

  “I had better be the Halcyon,” he mumbled to himself while pressing a hand to his belly. If he wasn’t, he’d never forgive himself for destroying such a beautiful artifact.

  His hands began to tremble.

  “Los damn it!” he growled. “I will not be like this.” He closed his eyes. “I won’t be weak. I won’t be crippled.”

  He had to regain his determination to defeat the golem and erase his cacography. He could do it, if he was bold enough, disciplined enough. There was no time for fear or guilt.

  He glared at the Index and cleared his mind of everything but the three asterisks of Shannon’s research journal. Then he placed his palm on the blank page before him.

  His mind shot upward like an arrow into another plane. But rather than a starry night sky, he floated before a massive golden wall that stretched out almost endlessly in either direction. The wall itself was made of Shannon’s Numinous prose.

  Nicodemus found himself staring at the journal’s first page, dated more than twenty years ago.

  Simply by thinking of a later entry, Nicodemus sent the wall sliding to his left. Looking at the wall’s distant end, he saw that the text bent back to form a massive circle.

  The codex-as-ring spun past in a golden blur. Then, without warning, it slammed to a dizzying, soundless stop.

  Shannon’s last entry glowed before him. It was a long Numinous spell annotated by common language sentences that glowed green.

  Nicodemus frowned, trying to glean the text’s purpose. The prose seemed to be that of a disspell, but it was not of the typical nonsense or antisense varieties. Its structure was that of a clamp.

  That made no sense. Normally disspells sought to pull apart another spell’s argument. This disspell looked as if it would try to hold the other text together.

  Nicodemus turned to the annotations. As he read, a smile spread across his face. “Magister,” he whispered. “It’s brilliant!”

  It was not a disspell at all, but an attack spell adapted to hold magical prose inside of a golem. If Nicodemus cast this text on the golem, its spirit would be trapped. The author would be vulnerable.

  Abruptly Shannon’s spell rushed forward to crash into Nicodemus’s mind. The rush of golden prose dazzled his eyes and then faded away to reveal the physical world.

  Once again Nicodemus stood swaying before the Index.

  A vivid knowledge of the anti-golem spell now burned in his brain. Shannon wanted him to have this when he took the boys up to the compluvium, Nicodemus realized. With this spell he could endanger the golem’s author without having to find its true body.

  A shiver rushed up Nicodemus’s back. He needed to return to the Drum Tower.

  The Index lay before
him. Closing the book made the halo of purple sentences collapse back into its pages. After a long breath, he turned away and started for the door.

  “Don’t you want the book?” a quick, squeaking voice said.

  Nicodemus jumped back. “Who’s there?” He began to write a club of simple Magnus sentences in his biceps.

  From the corner stepped a lanky gargoyle with a snow monkey’s body, a bat’s giant ears, and an owl’s bulging eyes. Nicodemus recognized the construct he had misspelled in the Stacks. “Gargoyle, did I meet you last night?”

  “Petra,” she said, nodding vigorously. “Now I’m named Petra.” She grinned at him before scampering to the doorway. “Take the book. You misspelled it like me.”

  “But the alarm spell will-”

  “Alarm spell nothing.” The gargoyle peeled a chord of faint Numinous sentences from one side of the doorway. “Get the book and step under this.” She pulled the alarm spell free of the floor and held it up above her head.

  Nicodemus stared at her for a moment, then fetched the Index. “But not even a grand wizard could move those sentences,” he said while ducking under the alarm.

  She nodded and spoke rapidly. “Since you rewrote me, I can do things other constructs can’t. I can trade and bargain. I got these eyes from a night-watch gargoyle, the ears from a grunt who hunts mice. But I think I still only have secondary thoughts.” She looked up at him with childish curiosity. “What’s the difference between secondary and tertiary cognition?”

  He grimaced. “Secondary constructs can’t remember anything about mortality. The academy claims they’re not fully sentient, so it’s not immoral to deconstruct them.”

  The gargoyle started. One of her batlike ears flicked away and then back. “Mortality?”

  Nicodemus nodded. “As in death. Secondary constructs can’t remember what it means to die.”

  “But I think I still only have secondary thoughts. What is the difference between secondary and tertiary cognition?” Her tone was the same tone as before.

  Nicodemus hugged the Index to his chest. “I’m sorry, Petra. I don’t know how to tell you.”

  The gargoyle didn’t seem to be listening; her ears were flicking about in different directions. “You should go!” she whispered. “I see and hear many things now. There are corrupt gargoyles now. We constructs are all talking about them. No one knows who’s written them. They’re spying on the wizards.”

  Nicodemus swallowed. “What about the gargoyles in the compluvium?”

  “They’re uncorrupted,” she said. “You should leave this place now. Something bad is near.”

  “Thank you, Petra,” he said and turned away.

  She laughed and called after him, “Thank you, Nicodemus Weal. You are my author who made me my own author.”

  Unsure of what to say, Nicodemus hurried away though the library’s cavernous center. A thousand thoughts raced through his mind. But when he stepped through the main entrance into the Women’s Atrium a realization made him stop.

  “Los damn it!” he swore. Because the Index was misspelled, so might be his understanding of Shannon’s text. There was no telling if he could produce a functional respell. Fear tightened his throat. Writing this attack spell might even be dangerous.

  He started to curse his cacography but then thought of Petra the gargoyle. It took him a moment to identify the warm feeling in his chest as pride-he hadn’t felt that for a long time.

  He drew in a deep breath and looked up at the atrium’s ceiling. The mosaic of Uriel Bolide looked back at him. With her left hand, Bolide was pointing a red wand at a scroll she held in her right. Chips of amber had been used to depict her celebrated long hair.

  Her smile was amused, as if she had just discovered the properties of magical advantage by applying a little femininity to a problem that had confounded the then all-male wizards.

  Nicodemus was struck by how strongly the woman in the mosaic resembled April. In the nightmare, April’s image had stretched above him and her hair had become trains of stars. “Fly from Starhaven!” she had said. “Fly with anything you have!”

  Again Nicodemus hugged the Index to his chest. It was all he had.

  His steps quickened until he was sprinting across the Stone Court. In a few hours someone would notice the missing Index. Before that happened, he had to hide all of the male cacographers in the compluvium.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  On his way up the stairwell, Nicodemus found the Drum Tower silent. He burst into the common room. A chair tried to bite his hip and was knocked flat for its trouble. “John!” he called. “John, wake up! We need to leave.”

  He rushed into his chamber and threw open the chest at the foot of his bed. With focused urgency, he pulled his winter cloak around his shoulders and then spread a blanket on the floor. On top of it he put the Index, the coin purse Shannon had given him, and a few spare clothes.

  His belt-purse lay on the foot of his sleeping cot. When he grabbed it, his fingers began to tingle. He frowned at first but then remembered the druidic artifact-the wooden sphere encircled by a root-that Deirdre had given him.

  The Seed of Finding. He put the druidic artifact on the blanket. He might need that.

  After scooping up the blanket and twisting it into a makeshift satchel, he ran into the common room.

  “Simple John?” Simple John asked from his doorway. The big man’s candle filled the room with flickering light and long shadows.

  “Everything’s all right, John,” Nicodemus said. “But I need your help gathering all our boys. Has Devin come back from her night-time janitorial?”

  “No,” the big man said, eyes wide. “No!”

  “John, look at me. Something bad has happened. You and I must take all the Drum Tower boys up to the compluvium. We’ll be safe there. And if we’re not, there’s a way we can leave Starhaven altogether.”

  The other man shook his head. “No!”

  Nicodemus cursed himself. “John, I didn’t mean to upset you. Everything’s going to be fine. But we must go quickly. Get anything you might need out of your room. Warm clothes especially.” Nicodemus moved for the door. “I’ll wake the boys.”

  John stepped in front of him. “No!” he again declared, his bulky frame blocking the door.

  “John, we have to do this. It’s not safe to stay.” John shook his head. When Nicodemus tried to move past him, John pushed him back with enough force to make him stumble.

  “John, listen to me!” Nicodemus said, setting down his makeshift satchel. “We must get the boys to safety.”

  This set the big man’s head shaking again.

  Nicodemus began to write common language sentences along each of his fingers. Against a normal spellwright, Nicodemus’s disability would have rendered him helpless. But now, facing another cacographer, he could use sentences simple enough for him to avoid misspelling. Simple John wouldn’t be able to edit or disspell them.

  “I’m sorry I have to do this,” he said, flicking his hands open and casting glowing white sentences to wrap around John’s arms and legs.

  The big man’s candle fell to the floor and winked out. Fortunately, the white glow from Nicodemus’s spells and the moonlight pouring through the windows provided sufficient light.

  In an attempt to edit the spells binding his arms, John cast a green sentence from his chin. Nicodemus caught and destroyed it with a disspell. John tried twice more, spitting out the spells like angry words. Even so, he was too slow. Nicodemus censored each sentence with a finger-flicked disspell.

  Seeming to realize that he could not compete with Nicodemus magically, John began to flex his massive arms. Two of the binding spells snapped. But even as the big man broke a third line, Nicodemus sent ten more glowing-white sentences, and then ten more.

  John made one last, heroic tug, which made him start to fall over. Nicodemus rushed over and grabbed the big man’s arm in time to set him down gently.

  John stopped struggling. He was bound as su
rely as if he were in chains.

  “I’m sorry to do this, John,” Nicodemus said. “I’ll untie you when you’re calmer. But you must understand that we are in danger. Unless we take the Drum Tower boys away, they may be hurt.”

  John was desperately shaking his head.

  “I’m going to wake the boys now,” Nicodemus said. “I’ll come back, and we’ll get you ready to go too. All right?” He moved for the door.

  Simple John made a sound then, a faint rumbling, as if a beehive were humming in his expansive chest. “Nnnn… no… nnn,” he growled. “Nnnn… nnn… Nico no.”

  “John, you said something different!”

  “Nnnnn… Nnnnico not go.”

  Nicodemus shook his head. “I need to step out quickly. I’ll be right back. Don’t worry.”

  John flinched. “Sstsss… strange man tells Simple John not let Nico go.”

  Nicodemus frowned. “Have you been talking to the foreign spellwrights?”

  “No! Long before Simple John comes to… comes to here, Typhon tells Simple John not to let Nico go.”

  “Typhon?” Nicodemus asked. “Do you mean typhoon? A storm talked to you?”

  John had to work his lips to speak. “Typhon… Typhoneus, red hair, shiny black skin… old, old, old.”

  Nicodemus studied John. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t know how it is you can say all these different things now. But John, we must hurry!”

  Tears ran down the big man’s face and caught on his throat’s stubble. “Yes!” he suddenly said. “I will help. But I need… need to get the big parchments.”

  “If I release you, you’ll gather your belongings so we can go? You won’t keep me from waking the boys?”

  “Won’t,” John said, “block door.”

  Satisfied, Nicodemus pulled his spells into his hands. He could always cast them out again.

  John struggled to his feet and lumbered into his room. Meanwhile, Nicodemus retrieved his bedsheet-turned-satchel.