Authors: Blake Charlton
“Magistra,” he said, “I suspect the same thing.”
D
EIRDRE CALMLY REGARDED
Amadi. A moment ago, the woman had appeared at her chamber door and demanded an interview.
“What is your interest in Nicodemus Weal?” the sentinel asked, sitting on Kyran’s sleeping cot.
Deirdre sat on the opposite cot. She had expected the question. “As you observed, Amadi Okeke, I had hoped the boy might be the Peregrine safely delivered to me. But his keloid dashed my hopes.” It was not truly a lie—the keloid had dashed her hopes…that Nicodemus would be easily won over.
Amadi nodded distractedly. “Druid, does your Order know of a counter-prophecy?”
“I have never heard of such a thing.”
“The Erasmine Counter-Prophecy is not common knowledge, even among wizards. It predicts that a malevolent spellwright will arise to become the Halcyon’s opposite, a champion of chaos referred to as the Petrel or the Storm Petrel.”
“And this champion,” Deirdre asked, “might slay the Halcyon and help the demons invade our land?”
The sentinel nodded. “The counter-prophecy predicts that unless we can stop it, the Petrel will begin a corruption of all language. The demons will complete it.”
Deirdre willed her face to be calm. “And Nicodemus’s unusual scar and his misspelling makes you suspect that he might be this destroyer?”
Amadi took a slow breath. “Doubtless you’ve heard rumors about…unrest in Starhaven. We have noticed a number of dangerous misspells, a few accidents, but nothing that should concern you as a delegate. As a sentinel, my first concern is maintaining safety throughout the convocation. To that end, I entertain all theories of what might be causing these odd events.” She paused. “If the druids also know of a counter-prophecy and could identify Nicodemus as—”
“We do not believe in a counter-prophecy,” Deirdre interrupted.
“But perhaps those concerned with the Silent Blight might think differently? Should I speak to the other druidic delegates?”
Deirdre shook her head. “We do not believe in a counter-prophecy of any kind. And the druids are not at all certain the Blight is connected to prophecy. I fear we cannot help you.”
“I see. Thank you, druid, for your time.” Amadi stood and stepped toward the door.
Deirdre rose with her. “If there is any other way I can help, you have only to ask.”
Amadi paused by the threshold. “Perhaps…” she said, turning back. “I wonder if you could tell me…do the druids know of a construct that appears to be made of flesh, but once deconstructed becomes clay?”
The strength seemed to drain from Deirdre’s legs. “Have you encountered such a creature?” she asked in what she hoped was a tone of disbelief, not shock.
The sentinel was studying her face. “I surprise you. Don’t think me mad for asking such a question. Magister Shannon and I were debating if such a thing was possible.”
Deidre forced her lips to smile. “I do not think it mad to wonder such things. We must always seek new understandings.” She paused. “What if Nicodemus truly is the dangerous spellwright of your counter-prophecy?”
The sentinel shook her head. “There is no need to be alarmed. In less than a quarter hour, I will have two guards following the boy night and day. His tower will be textually sealed at night. The moment we have evidence that he is dangerous or connected to the counter-prophecy, we’ll censor his mind and lock him up in a cell below the Gate Towers.”
“Thank you for telling me.” Deirdre bowed.
Amadi returned the gesture and left. Slowly the sentinel’s footsteps faded down the hall.
“How much of that did you hear?” Deirdre asked.
“Enough,” Kyran said from behind her. “So it seems the black-robeshave encountered the demon-worshiper you guessed was nearby. Do I need to explain about the creature turning from flesh to clay?”
She turned and saw his silhouette glimmer as he let the invisibility subtext deconstruct. “No, you bloody don’t.”
The subtext fell from Kyran’s head, revealing a stern expression. “We should take the boy now. Our goddess can protect him once we get him to the ark.”
Deirdre rubbed her eyes. “We can’t. You heard the sentinel; she’s placing guards around the boy.” The pressure on her eyelids caused floating orange-black splotches across her vision. “Ky, do you think we could find the author’s body, kill the demon-worshiper while the creature is sneaking about?”
“No. The true body could be anywhere.”
Deirdre swore. “And if Amadi Okeke gets it into her head that Nicodemus is this Petrel, she’ll censor him and send him to his death in that prison cell.”
“He wouldn’t be safe from the creature when locked up?”
She dropped her hands and gave him an exasperated look. “What would happen if you tied up a lamb and left it in the sheep pen?”
He grimaced. “The lycanthropes would come out of the woods.”
Nicodemus stared at the flecks of stew that spangled his emptied lunch bowl.
Midday sunlight was streaming into the refectory—a wide Lornish hall lined with tapestries and clear-glass windows. Above, broad rafters marched across the ceiling and provided hanging posts for the academy’s banners. Farther down the table, several librarians whispered about the horrible news from Trillinon.
Using his spoon, Nicodemus began to flatten the drops of congealing stew on the inside of his bowl. A mash of conflicting emotions seethed within his mind.
Half an hour before, he had hurried into the refectory, heart pounding. The nightmare had been as vivid as the previous night’s dragon dream. He had been sure it had also come from the murderer, but he couldn’t imagine why the villain would send him such strange visions.
He had mulled over the nightmare’s images while fetching his stew and finding a private space to sit. The more he thought about the dream, the more it seemed that the episodes of the neophyte and the turtles were incongruous. That had calmed him somewhat. Mundane nightmares were filled with nonsensical shifts. Perhaps the bizarre sequence meant that the dream was simply a dream.
Whatever the case, Nicodemus had told himself, Shannon would know what to do about it; there was no use in worrying now.
He had tried to think about his successful first composition lecture but ended up fretting about the sentinels who had been spying on him. Did they still think him capable of murder? The question had made him think about James Berr, the murdering cacographer who had lived so long ago. Did the sentinels think he was a second James Berr?
Then he had thought about what the druid had told him. Her words had awakened a dormant longing in his heart. Could he actually be the Halcyon? After all these years of coming to terms with his disability, could his cacography be removed?
Half of him wanted to lose himself in dreams of what life might be likeif the druid were correct. But the other half was wary and more than a little frightened. What if he dared to believe that he was not crippled and then, once again, discovered that it was all a lie? Could he survive a second disappointment?
He felt his belt-purse for the magical artifact Deirdre had given him. A Seed of Finding, she had called it. Even through cloth, the object made his fingers tingle.
The artifact’s power spoke to the druid’s sincerity. However, she was clearly after something more than curing his cacography. The more Nicodemus thought about it, the more he questioned her motives.
“Fiery blood,” he grumbled, flattening another drop of stew with extra force.
Then there was the advice he had given to the smart-mouthed cacographic boy in his class: “Accept your disability and you will be free,” had been the essence of his message. It had seemed true at the time, but here he was, fervently hoping that his own disability could be erased.
Did that make him a hypocrite? He brought the spoon to his lips and tapped its tip against his front teeth. “Yes,” he grunted, “it bloody well does.”
Suddenly Nicodemus wished everything would just go away. If only he could crawl back to his room and spend the rest of the day reading the knightly romance stored under his bed.
Abruptly Devin thumped her lunch bowl down on the table and sat next to him. “Heard the news?” she asked. “That why you look like you’ve seen Erasmus’s ghost?”
Nicodemus dropped his spoon with a wooden clatter. “Dev, thank heaven you’re here! I need to tell…” his voice died as he remembered his promise to Shannon not to trust anyone. “…need to tell you that I taught my first class on spellwriting. It went well. But the news was so shocking that…I don’t know how to feel.”
“None of us does,” she grumbled, sinking a battered wooden spoon into her stew. “Nico, do you think Starhaven takes care of us?”
“Of course. Most likely we’d have magical literacy permanently censored from our minds if we were in Astrophell.”
“But maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Do you think common folk are distressed by a fire in Trillinon? What’s foreign news to a pig farmer?”
“But, Dev, you’d be illiterate.”
She shrugged. “I don’t read anything but janitorial texts. Sometimes I feel like we’re just ants in an anthill, crippled ants at that. And here comes King Ant now.” She nodded at the raised stage on the far side of the hall. Several deans and foreign spellwrights were standing around a long table.
The provost, sitting in a high-backed wooden chair, floated onstage. Even from his present distance, Nicodemus could make out the muris spell billowing under the arch-wizard’s seat. If he had been closer, he would have seen an obscenely old man who had been half folded over by time. He also would have seen the grizzled old raccoon the provost kept as a familiar.
“Behold,” Devin intoned, “Provost Ferran Montserrat: the only independent mind in this stone heap. That man doesn’t answer to anybody but our god and his avatar. The rest of us are bound, antlike, to his will.”
Nicodemus watched the provost float to the table’s head. With surprising dexterity, the ancient arch-wizard landed his chair and picked up a fork. The deans and their guests sat and began eating.
“Everything is so damn complicated,” Nicodemus grumbled before swearing softly, “blood of Los.”
“Piss and blood in a silver bowl!” Devin hissed. “I forgot!”
Nicodemus jumped slightly in his seat. “Forgot what?”
Devin’s pale face flushed red as she visibly struggled to contain a salvo of obscenity. “Two days ago Magistra Highsmith caught me napping on duty. The old hussy of a historian is making me give a short lecture about Los to the rest of the girls on janitorial. It’s her idea of a penance. The old shrew knows cacographers never study theology. I was supposed to look it up but didn’t.”
Nicodemus raised his eyebrows. “When do you lecture?”
“In half an hour,” Devin said with a glare that dared him to chide her. Fortunately, he knew enough to keep his mouth shut. When she spoke again, it was in a calmer voice. “Nico, tell me everything you know about Los.”
“I’m a cacographer too, you know. I never took theology either.”
“But you memorize everything Shannon says and fawn—”
“All right, all right. Back on the ancient continent there was a golden age when the Solar Empire…and that’s not the Neosolar Empire, which formed on this continent. Anyway, the original Solar Empire existed in peace with the gods. But someone committed a grave sin that enabled Los, then a powerful earth god, to become the first demon.”
“But what sin—”
Nicodemus shrugged. “Every religion has a different answer. Probably no one’s right; probably that knowledge was lost when our ancestors crossed the ocean. As wizards we hold to no belief and so are not bound to a religion or kingdom. All you need to know is that Los took a third of the deities to Mount Calax and turned them into demons. He made an army of all the demons and called it the Pandemonium. That’s where the word comes from: Pan, all, demonium, demons. So when we say the class was pandemonium we’re using hyperbole to—”
“Blasted pisser—” Devin cut herself short and calmed down. “Nico, I get it. Could you just give me the history without your linguistic ramblings?”
Nicodemus grumbled about history and linguistic ramblings being the same thing before continuing. “So after Los formed the Pandemonium, there was a war between deities and demons called the Apocalypse. When it became clear the demons would win, the human deities built huge Exodus ships to cross the ocean. Somehow—no one’s sure how—a group of human heroes turned Los into stone. This bought the ships enough time to get out to sea. The demons, being bound to the ancient continent, couldn’t follow. Then a powerful wind called the Maelstrom scattered the Exodus ships. That’s why each of the current landfall kingdoms has people of different shapes and colorings.”
Devin narrowed her eyes. “In ancient kingdoms everyone looked the same?”
“More or less. Certainly someone like me with black hair and olive skin would not have come from the same kingdom as someone with your red hair and freckles.”
“There’s no need to be snotty, Nico. Cacographers aren’t taught this stuff. And I don’t hang on Magister’s every miniature lecture like you do. When wizards gossip, I’ll listen. But I’d rather chew gravel that listen to most of their academic babble.” She sniffed. “Just another reason why it’d be better if I were illiterate.”
“I’m sorry, Dev, I didn’t mean…But don’t be so unhappy. Even if they permanently censored you, it’s not as if you would be free. You’ve told me yourself, magical illiterates are bound to the land or their trade. They have to work in the fields for lords or barons or whatnot.”
She only shrugged and turned back to her stew. “Couldn’t be worse than it is here.”
Nicodemus leaned forward. “Dev, you’d have no spells to wash your face or clean your teeth. No constructs to empty the night pot. And you’d be short-lived.”
Suddenly her brown eyes burned with their characteristic fire. “Well f—” Again she visibly suppressed an obscenity. “I don’t care a fig for that! Not all of us are as strong as you, Nico. I’ll barely see a century. And I’m nearly fifty already. I might not look it, but I am. If I were illiterate, at least I wouldn’t outlive my family.”