Authors: Blake Charlton
Amadi nodded. “Three kingdoms tried to remake this chunk of Chthonic rock in their image. All failed, and now we wizards play in the ruins.”
Kale chuckled. But before he could say what he found funny, the sound of running feet filled the courtyard.
Amadi turned around to see a young Starhaven acolyte skid to a halt. “Magistra Okeke, you’re to come to Engineer’s library immediately!”
Amadi frowned. “On whose command?”
The boy shook his head. “Don’t know her name, Magistra. A grand wizard, she wears a white badge and three stripes on her sleeves.”
Amadi swore. Only a deputy provost could wear such marks. “Take us there quickly,” she said.
The boy turned and ran. Amadi hiked up her robes and followed.
They pursued the young page through a blur of hallways to an archway large enough to admit seven horses running abreast.
Beyond sat an extraordinarily wide library. Long ago Starhaven engineers had filled the place with a row of limestone bridges that spanned the width of the room.
Along each arch stretched wooden facades decorated in the ornate Spirish style and converted into bookshelves. A labyrinth of traditional bookshelves flowed beneath the bridges like a river’s convoluted currents.
The place was alive with yelling librarians. Teams of black-robes rushed across bridges and among the bookshelves. A sudden, golden jet of Numinous prose exploded from one bridge and was quickly followed by a chorus of shouts.
“Mother ocean!” Kale issued the Ixonian curse. “What’s happening?”
Suddenly a nearby bookshelf burst into a molten ball of silvery Magnus. Amadi had just enough time to turn away and cover her face before a shockwave of fragmented prose and manuscripts struck.
When Amadi looked back, she saw a pile of rubble where the shelf had stood. “Firey blood of Los!” she swore. Amid the detritus now wriggled four pale-skinned constructs that took the shape of giant worms or grubs.
Each was roughly a foot long, possessing huge eyes and a segmented body. Just below each spell’s bulbous head sprouted three pairs of legs that ended in childlike human hands. More distressing were the bulging hind portions; in those segments speckled bits of half-digested text shone through their translucent carapaces.
“Disspell them before they reach a shelf!” Amadi barked and drew her arm back. Within moments she had filled her fist with a lacerate disspell.
Already the nightmare constructs were scurrying for nearby books. Their grasping, childlike hands moved them over the debris with alarming speed.
Beside her, Kale extemporized a spear made of common magical language. With an ululating war cry, he charged.
Amadi cast her disspell with her best overhand throw. The lacerate text—a whirling mass of Magnus shards—shot through the air to slice through a monster’s abdomen. The spell wailed as its carapace split open and disgorged its textual viscera.
Kale leaped over the deconstructing monster and gracefully thrust at the next worm. The thing jumped back to avoid the spear’s blade.
Kale, like many Ixoanians, was an excellent spearman. The instant his boots touched ground, he leaped and thrust again.
The worm retreated again but too slowly. Kale’s spearhead plunged into its abdomen. The thing shrieked and tried to pull away, but Kale had twisted his spear and caught the thing’s carapace with the spearhead’s barbs.
“Magistra,” he called, improvising a club of blunt passages. “By the bridge!” With a powerful club stroke, he split the construct’s head with a crack.
Amadi looked beyond the secretary and saw another construct scampering toward the bridge. By this time, she had composed another lacerate disspell. “Where’s the fourth?” she shouted. “Find it.”
As she had written it to do, her lacerate dispersed midair and bom-barded the unfortunate monster with a storm of blades. The thing clicked and squealed as it began to writhe into deconstruction.
“I can’t find the fourth!” Kale called. “I can’t find it!” He was turning around frantically, looking for the fourth monster.
Amadi’s heart went cold. Not eight feet behind him, one of the monsters had reached a bookshelf. It reared up on its abdomen and used its childish hands to pull a heavy codex from the shelves.
“Behind you!” Amadi shouted.
As Kale spun around, the giant worm opened the book. Its head unraveled itself into a cloud of glowing golden prose.
Kale lunged. But even as his spear whistled through the air, the creature jammed its textual head into the book. Instantly, the thing’s body textualized and dove into the pages.
Kale’s spear swung through empty air as the codex fell to the floor and snapped shut.
“Damn it! Get back from the book!” Amadi ordered. Kale deftly jumped away. She ran in and covered the infected codex in a thick Magnus shield.
“Magister, what’s happened?” a frightened voice asked. Amadi glanced up to see the boy who had led them to the library staring at Kale. She returned to swaddling the book with Magnus sheets.
“What were those things?” the boy asked.
Kale squatted down to look in the boy’s eyes. “Are you all right, lad? There’s no danger anymore, but we need to stand farther away.”
The boy nodded as Kale pulled him back. “What were they?”
“Bookworms,” Kale explained gravely. “Malicious language that invades manuscripts. They eat all the prose in a text and use it to make copies of themselves. When there are too many bookworms in a codex, it explodes. They use the explosion to spread themselves to other books.”
“And one of them got into that book?” the boy asked.
“That’s why Magistra is casting a containing spell around it. That will protect us if it bursts.”
Amadi had never encased an infected codex before, and so she was relieved when she glanced up and saw a small train of librarians rushing toward her. At their head strode an ancient grand wizard in a deputy provost’s robe.
“Sentinel Amadi Okeke of Astrophell, I presume?” the deputy provost boomed. She was a short, fat woman. A thin halo of white hair wreathed her wrinkled face. Her hood was lined with orange cloth signifying that she was a librarian. Given her rank, she was undoubtedly Starhaven’s Dean of Libraries.
“Yes, Magistra,” Amadi blurted, silently cursing herself for not learning this woman’s name.
The dean wasted no time. “What is this situation?”
“A violent deconstruction produced four class-four bookworm constructs,” Amadi reported. “Three curses were deconstructed but the last infected this codex.”
The ancient dean nodded to a librarian behind her. “Hand that to Magister Luro here. He’ll lift the curse or destroy the book.”
Amadi handed the infected codex to the young grand wizard who stepped forward.
The deputy provost studied her for a moment. “Magistra, we are facing a bookworm infection unlike any I have known. Starhaven’s protective language is among the most robust in the world, and yet these curses have spread to four libraries. They are rapidly destroying invaluable manuscripts.”
The ancient woman shook her head. “They’ve tertiary cognition and their executive language confounds all but our most direct methods of deconstruction. Whoever wrote them has an astounding understanding of textual intelligence.”
“Textual intelligence?” Amadi repeated. That was Shannon’s specialty.
“Indeed,” the dean continued. “I must have all available sentinels under my command until this infection is contained. We cannot let the foreign delegates see this chaos. It would embarrass the academy.”
As if to punctuate her point, a massive silver ball blossomed on the farthest bridge. An instant later, a thunder-like boom shook the library.
Amadi flinched. “Yes, Magistra, right away.”
But the other woman was already striding off in the direction of the blast. Her train of librarians hurried after.
Amadi turned to her secretary. “Wake our sleeping authors and fetch those not fulfilling essential duties. They’re to report to her immediately.”
Kale raised his eyebrows. “Even those guarding the Drum Tower and Magister Shannon?”
Amadi took a deep breath. “Leave the two following Shannon, but pull the guards from Shannon’s quarters and the Drum Tower. We’ll put them back as soon as the infection’s contained.”
“Right away, Magistra,” Kale said and was off running.
Strangely, Nicodemus knew he was dreaming.
Around him seethed a tunnel of gray and black language—an endless, meaningless mash of written words. He was traveling down it. Magister Shannon’s voice sounded above him: “I don’t understand. Turtles?”
Then his own voice: “Look, that hexagonal pattern…”—the words became faint—“…of a turtle shell.”
The voices died and in their place sounded a long series of rhythmic, echoing clacks.
And then Nicodemus stood in the cavern of his previous nightmare—low ceiling, gray floors, a black stone table. The body lying upon it was again covered in white. Again a teardrop emerald lay in its gloved hands.
But new to the cavern was a standing stone, as tall as a man and as broad as a horse. It stood behind the black table. Three undulating lines flowed from the stone’s top down to its base.
White, vinelike stalks erupted from the ground and swayed to an unfelt breeze. The stalks sprouted pale ivy leaves and began to intertwine. Within moments, a knee-high snarl of albino ivy covered the floor.
“I was the demon’s slave,” a low voice rumbled. It came from everywhere. “I cut him in the river.” The voice grew louder. “I cut him in the river!”
Nicodemus tried to run, but the pale ivy entangled his legs. He tried to scream, but his throat produced only a long painful hiss. He reached down to pull at the weeds but froze when he saw his hands covered by the hexagonal plates of a turtle’s shell.
Suddenly he could not move so much as his eyelid. From toe to top hair he was encased in thick black shell.
“I CUT HIM IN THE RIVER!”
A blinding red light enveloped Nicodemus. Agony lanced through his every fiber as his shell shattered.
Looking up, he saw the emerald produce a sphere of light—wispy and sallow at the edges, but blazing green at its core.
The small emerald’s radiance grew until it burned the cavern and everything in it into airy nothingness.
Above stretched a pale-blue sky, below, lush savanna grass. Ancient oak trees dotted a hillside that overlooked the wide, green water of a reservoir. Nicodemus recognized the place as a springtime Spirish meadow near his father’s stronghold.
In the meadow’s center, a tattered blanket provided seating for a young boy and a woman. She was a rare beauty: pale skin with a light spray of freckles, bright hazel eyes set above a snub nose, thin lips, a delicate chin.
But her most stunning feature was the long bronze hair cascading down her back in slow curls that glinted gold in the sunlight.
A book, a knightly romance, sat in the woman’s lap. Her lips moved as she read from it but the dream provided no sound.
The boy had long black hair and a dark olive complexion. He was perhaps eight years old and gazed at the woman with fierce green eyes. This was as much a memory as it was a dream.
The woman’s name was April, the boy’s Nicodemus.
This was a vision of long ago when Lord Severn—Nicodemus’s father—had seen fit to educate his bastard. The lord had brought April into his household ostensibly to educate his son, but most everyone knew the lord visited her chamber at night.
April had been a kind teacher but not a determined one. After Nicodemus’s first dozen futile reading lessons, she began reading her favorite books aloud to him. Being Lornish, April had been enamored of knightly romances. And after the first tale of maidens and monsters, so was the young Nicodemus.
The dream became fluid. The vision of April and his young self began to flicker. Now Nicodemus’s image was ten years old. There were flashes of Nicodemus reading alone, but more often he was with April, begging her for something.
Memory provided the details the dream left out. In what was perhaps the only shrewd act of her life, April had noticed Nicodemus’s interest in knightly romance and began reading to him less and less. When possible, she stopped at a tale’s most exciting point, claiming she was too tired to continue.
The young Nicodemus yearned to learn what happened next in each story, but his progress was slow. At times he confused his frustration regarding the text with his frustration regarding his governess’s body.
Noticing his improvement, April ceased reading to him entirely but supplied more books. Now the dream showed only images of Nicodemus reading alone.
The dream world shifted. Gone were the meadow and sunshine.Nicodemus now watched his ten-year-old self lying abed in his small Severn Hold chamber. He was reading a book titled
Sword of Flame.
The bedside candles danced as several nights flickered by—this was the time when, in three agonizing months, Nicodemus had taught himself to read so that he might find out if Aelfgar, a noble paladin, could mend Cailus, his broken sword, with the Fire Stones of Ta’nak, and then wield it to free the beautiful Shahara from Zade, an evil cleric who commanded the snakelike Zadsernak.
Although the youthful Nicodemus had had trouble remembering the many silly invented names, he was delighted with the story’s inevitable course and eager to read the next twenty-seven books in the series, though he doubted that they were all as good.
Time flickered again. Now Nicodemus saw the warm night on which he had finished
Sword of Flame.
His young self laid the book down on his chest and fell asleep to the sound of spring rain and the cries of a full robin’s nest outside his window.
“No,” the adult Nicodemus moaned. On this night, in a dream about April, he would be born to magic. The resulting magical effulgence would set the entire western wing of Severn Hold on fire, killing a horse and maiming two stable boys.
“Wake!” Nicodemus shouted. “Wake up!” But his boyish self slept on. He tried to move but found his adult legs paralyzed. The window above young Nicodemus creaked open.