Authors: Blake Charlton
Nicodemus started to protest but then stopped. “You’d want to get married?”
“Oh, a bloody donkey’s ass-crack on that!” she snapped. “I damned well don’t want to get married.” She began stirring her stew with trembling hands.
Nicodemus could not think of what to say, so he sat in silence and waited until she appeared calmer.
“Dev,” he said at last. “Last night I asked you what Smallwood meant when he called me Shannon’s new pet cacographer.”
“Forget it. It’s nothing important.” She scowled. “Though it proves my point about being illiterate.”
Nicodemus touched her elbow. “Tell me? Please?”
Devin looked at him. “It’s all hearsay.”
He nodded.
After laying her spoon down, she scooted a conspiratorial half-inch closer on the bench. “Well, years ago Magister was a rising star in Astrophell, both in research and politics. He was also an oddity because his father came from Dral, but his mother from Trillinon. That’s why his names sound so different—Agwu Shannon. Anyway, his faction, The Sons of Ejindu, wanted the wizards to take a more active role in keeping any rogue spellwrights from joining the Spirish Civil War. Shannon was their Long Council speaker. And…” Devin lowered her voice. “And…he got the provost’s grandniece pregnant!”
Nicodemus looked dubious. “But spellwrights can’t conceive. We’re all sterile.”
Devin smiled at him. “Nico, sometimes I forget how young you are. That’s what we tell the acolytes. Together we’re all barren. No two spellwrights have ever conceived. But every so often, a spellwright and an illiterate produce a child.”
“Shannon got an illiterate pregnant!”
“Shhhh!” She swatted his shoulder. “Not so loud. Now you see why we authors swear off families. We would outlive them and have to watch them die. That’s why it was a huge scandal when Shannon got the provost’s grandniece with child.”
Nicodemus could only shake his head.
She continued, “So Shannon tried to hide the baby, but his opponents discovered the boy and started the scandal. The provost of Astrophell was furious and made Shannon Master of the Drum Tower in Starhaven. To get rid of him, you see.”
“And then?”
“No one knows exactly. Some say Magister did something desperate with his research, hoping a breakthrough would earn him forgiveness. Some say he’s blind because his research spell burned out his mundane vision. But whatever happened Magister ended up here at Starhaven. He couldn’t visit Astrophell for twenty years or so. By then his wife had died and his son was married. Magister tried to patch things up, but apparentlyhis son hated him for abandoning the family and denounced Magister in public.”
Nicodemus blew out a long breath.
“So Magister came back here and became a champion of cacographers.” Her wide eyes darted up for a moment. “He chooses one cacographic boy from every generation and tries to help him earn a hood. Before you it was Tomas Rylan. Tom lived with John and me. Magister helped him become a lesser wizard in Starfall Janitorial.”
Nicodemus felt his face burn. Had Shannon chosen him as an apprentice only because he wanted a new pet cripple?
Devin stirred the dregs of her stew. “From the moment you came to the Drum Tower, you were Magister’s favorite. We weren’t surprised when he moved you into the top floor with John and me years before you had earned it.”
“Oh” was all Nicodemus could bring himself to say.
Devin looked at him. “So that’s what Smallwood meant.”
Nicodemus’s mind reeled. Shannon had taken him as an apprentice only out of pity? He felt sick. “Thank you, Dev,” he said quietly.
“Nico, you shouldn’t hold it against Magister; he only wants to help.”
He stood. “I should go.”
Devin caught his hand and squeezed. “Nico, everyone loves you in the Drum Tower. John and I…Don’t feel bad.”
“I have to meet the old man in the compluvium.” He squeezed her hand in return. “I don’t want to be late.”
“Okay.”
He picked up his bowl and cup. “See you tonight,” he said and walked away.
Six of Starhaven’s twenty eastern towers held the Sataal Landing more than four hundred feet above ground. Nicodemus tried not to think about the height as he walked eastward along the thin stone concourse. Every fifty feet or so, he climbed a few broad steps to the next plaza.
The surrounding towers and nearby mountains blocked direct sunlight from the landing for all but a few hours during the day. The Chthonics had once cultivated a shade garden here. Antiquarians wrote of tall mountain laurels and soil beds bursting with angel wings, fetterbush, and barronwort.
Now the soil beds nurtured only weeds and ivy. Moss bristled between the wall stones. Feral cats skulked about the place looking for fresh water. Nicodemus couldn’t see anyone following him but guessed a subtextualized sentinel was near.
As he ventured farther east, the towers crowded closer. At each new level, the plaza was smaller, the stairway narrower.
Finally the landing terminated in a small, mossy cloister. Nicodemus found his way blocked by the thirty-foot wall that ran between the abandoned Itan and Karkin Towers. A row of metal rungs climbed halfway up the wall to a narrow walkway. Voices echoed from above.
Nicodemus scaled the ladder and found its rungs spaced too closely for human comfort. The Chthonics must have had small hands, he decided. Or maybe small claws? Or perhaps they had had no claws or hands at all but had gripped the rungs with their teeth.
On top of the walkway stood a smiling Magister Shannon with Azure on his shoulder. The old man was cheerfully lecturing four Northern sentinels: “…obvious reasons the compluvium’s constructs are written aggressively. So we mustn’t—ah, Nicodemus, you’re here at last.”
The sentinels, three men, one woman, all were roughly sixty years in age and wearing gold or silver buttons on their sleeves. They examined Nicodemus with narrowed eyes. Shannon laughingly introduced them as his personal guards.
Nicodemus bowed. He understood their confused looks. They had beensent to investigate Shannon and were taken aback by the old man’s enthusiasm. Nicodemus couldn’t blame them.
Shannon grabbed Nicodemus’s arm and pulled him through the crowd. The old wizard’s grip felt like a vise.
The walkway on which they were standing ran into a crevice where the Karkin Tower met the wall. Here a narrow staircase climbed to the wall’s top. A seven-foot-tall gargoyle stood guard on the bottommost step.
Its muscled body would have been humanoid, save for the two extra arms growing under the expected pair. And the stone wings bulging from its back would have resembled bird wings but for the two additional carpal joints that allowed the limbs to fold into tight, fiddlehead spirals. Its giant hawk’s head glared at the spellwrights with stony eyes.
Shannon was again lecturing the sentinels. “Those of you who’ve dealt with a war-weight gargoyle will remember that they are dangerous, valuable, and fractious. So use great care when presenting these passwords.” The old man produced a scroll from his sleeve and began pulling off Numinous paragraphs.
Nicodemus watched as Shannon handed a set of passwords to each sentinel. The Northerners, however, were studying the massive gargoyle and glancing at one another.
Suddenly Nicodemus realized that Shannon was allowing the golden paragraphs to fold into pleated and stacked sheets: this conformation stabilized much of its language but strained those sentences that folded the text. Such tension could cause rearrangement or fragmentation.
Sure enough, when Shannon handed a copy of the passwords to the female sentinel, two bending sentences snapped.
Nicodemus spoke up, “Magister, her text has—”
“Don’t worry, lad. I’ll take you through myself. Excuse me, spellwrights. My apprentice has not yet mastered Numinous.”
He grabbed Nicodemus again and dragged him to the massive gargoyle. Nicodemus’s stomach knotted until the old man released his arm and held out two password texts.
The gargoyle extended its four arms. Each pair of hands took a paragraph and began to fold them. If written correctly, the spells would fold into a pre-set shape.
When the aquiline gargoyle had creased each paragraph into a small starlike shape, it chirped and moved aside.
Shannon put a hand on Nicodemus’s back and guided him onto the stairway between the Karkin Tower and the wall.
Behind them, two sentinels held out their passwords to the gargoyle’s many arms.
“Be ready for anything,” Shannon muttered.
Confused, Nicodemus turned back just as the war-weight gargoyle began shrieking. Two bulky stone arms struck the wall with percussive force. A wing unfurled to block the passage.
A chorus of shocked sentinel voices came from the other side.
“Magisters,” Shannon scolded, “you let the passwords fragment! How could you be so careless with a pleated sheet? Check the other two paragraphs.”
An apologetic female voice replied that they too had deconstructed.
“Wonderful,” Shannon barked. “I can’t cast Numinous past this war-weight gargoyle without exciting it to violence.”
A dour male voice replied, “Magister, we’ve orders not to lose sight of you.”
Shannon laughed. “A fine job you’ve made of that. Now Nicodemus and I lack the protection we were promised. Burning heaven! I’ve a mind to complain to Amadi of this.”
The sentinels were silent.
Shannon instructed them to hurry down to the ground level and then hike back up the Itan Tower. From there they might reach the Spindle Bridge. He and Nicodemus would wait on the bridge. “Make it back in an hour and Amadi needn’t know,” he said and then turned to hike up the steps toward the top of the wall.
The sentinels set off in the opposite direction. Nicodemus hurried after the old man.
“Now we may speak freely,” Shannon said with satisfaction. “Even the subtextualized sentinel following you can’t get past that brute.”
Nicodemus frowned. “Magister, the passwords were misspelled?”
“Not in the least,” Shannon said, turning back long enough to wink a blind eye. “They couldn’t have been spelled more correctly.”
I
N THE
I
TAN
Tower, Deirdre laughed at what she saw through the window bars.
She was standing next to Kyran in an abandoned Chthonic hallway—a dark place with slate floors, cracked walls of deep-blue plaster, a black ceiling shaped like roots or rocks. Everything was coated with centuries of dust.
Bright autumn sunlight slanted in through the barred windows, illuminating clouds of languid dust motes. A hand moving through the chilly air spun a few bright specks; Kyran’s body pulled with it a maelstrom of flying, sunlit dirt.
“Shannon’s used the hawk-headed construct to fool the Northern wizards,” Deirdre said. “The simpletons are hurrying down toward the ground. Ky, go and follow them. I want to know if they report his trick.”
“I shouldn’t leave you.”
She turned to look at her protector. Though stooped and leaning on his thick walking staff, he still had to hold his head at an awkward angle to avoid the low ceiling. It made him seem like a giant.
“Are we having this argument again?” she asked, smiling. “You know I never lose.”
“Because you never argue about what matters.”
“Ky, this is not the time. I need you to watch those wizards.”
“There’s not another soul for a half mile. Even the black-robes don’t come here.”
Her smile wilted.
His dark eyes glared at her. Then, with a barely audible grunt, he nodded. One long stride brought him to the barred window. The sunlight turned his hair to gleaming gold, his robes to solar white. He watched the four sentinels hurrying down the stone platform, then turned and strode away down the hall, his walking staff clicking against the stone floor.
Deirdre looked out the window again. Shannon and Nicodemus were hiking up the steep stairway between the wall and the tower. She would need to climb up a few more floors to keep them in view. She set off in the opposite direction from Kyran.
For once, Deirdre was not irritated by her short stature. She did not need to stoop when stepping through the Chthonic doorways, nor did her small feet slip on the short steps.
A cloud of pigeons shot past a nearby window. Deirdre found herself thinking about Shannon. Was Nicodemus’s trust in the old wizard well placed? Dare she approach him?
Because she was preoccupied with these questions, it wasn’t until she had completed a circuit around the tower, and so climbed to the next level, that she noticed the footsteps.
She stopped near the top of the staircase. The footsteps ceased as well. “Ky,” she called, “you’re to follow the sentinels, not follow me around like a mother hen.”
At first silence greeted her words. But then the footsteps returned at a sprint.
Deirdre’s heart began to pound. The wizards had not allowed her to wear a blade. Instinctively, her eyes searched about for a weapon and fell on the horizontal bars the Chthonics had built into their windows. She rushed over and grabbed two rods that had been drilled into the window frame.
No living man could have pulled them free. But Deirdre needed only toput one foot on the wall and heave. The bars exploded from the frame with small clouds of pulverized stone.
The footsteps were loud and echoing now. She crouched and held the two steel bars up in Spirish fighting fashion.
The figure that came running up the staircase wore a tattered white cloak—more a hastily sewn sheet than a proper garment. A voluminous hood covered his head and face.
As Deirdre raised her crude weapons, the creature ran through a square sunbeam. An object extending from his hand became a blazing rectangle of reflected light.
The glare momentarily dazzled her eyes, so it wasn’t until the creature was a few steps away that she identified the steel object as an ancient Lornish greatsword.
“L
ISTEN CAREFULLY
,” Shannon said, stepping onto the wall at the end of the Sataal Landing. “We don’t have much time.”