Authors: Blake Charlton
“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 underthis.” 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.
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 surely 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.
A moment later, the large man reappeared holding two parchments.
“John, how can you say all these things when no one has heard you say anything but your name, ‘no,’ and ‘splattering splud’?”
“Splattering splud,” John echoed forlornly. “Long before, Simple John was the son of a tailor in Trilli…Trillinon. But John was stupid so father says get out. Simple John lived on streets for years before Typhon comes. Typhon says he make Simple John unstupid. He can fix all brokenpeople. But says that depends on…Nico. He says Simple John must look after Nico and make sure he doesn’t leave south place…here. Typhon brings Simple John here. Tells me to say only three things. Typhon teaches me big alphabets and tells me to watch Nico. Typhon comes back with emerald every four years to visit Nico when he’s sleeping. And he says to use these”—he held up the parchments—“if Nico tries to go.”
“Emerald?” Nicodemus exclaimed. “John, what are you talking about? You know that someone came to watch me sleep? Did he steal my ability to spell?”
Rather than answer, John reached into his parchment and pulled out a spell that Nicodemus had heard about but never seen.
Written in silvery Magnus, its pumpkin-sized, two-part body resembled that of a spider, but its hundred multi-jointed legs were nothing like the relative tameness of arachnid appendages. These horrific limbs were twice as long as a man was tall and covered with sharp stony barbs. They rasped their tarsals across the floor.
It was a spell, Nicodemus knew, that had been written during the Dialect Wars, when the Numinous Order had entangled itself in the fall of the Neosolar Empire. It was a time when wizard fought wizard, when new magical languages and societies formed, when deceit and bloodspells killed thousands. And on the day the fighting ceased and the new magical societies agreed never to make war again, the aracknus spell—one of which John now held—was forbidden.
Judging from his eyes, Simple John had had no idea what he was about to pull from the parchment. When the bloodspell bloomed in the big man’s hand, he cried out and dropped the construct. With a whirl of legs, the bloodspell shot toward Nicodemus faster than an uncoiling snake.
Nicodemus dropped his satchel and instinctively cast the white spells he had previous used to bind Simple John. But a long leg flicked out and snapped the sentences like threads. And then the bloodspell was on him, gripping him with tens of its horrific legs, lifting him up. A sticky Magnus rope emerged from its abdomen.
Like a spider wrapping its victim in silk, the aracknus spell spun Nicodemus around with its claws. Within moments, all but his head and left arm were enclosed in a cocoon.
The bloodspell scampered up the wall onto the ceiling. After reaching down, it hoisted Nicodemus into the air and, with a second length of sticky rope, bound the cocoon to a rafter.
Then the bloodspell spread itself out, its hundred legs securing its grip: a nightmare on the ceiling. Below, Nicodemus swung helplessly imprisoned.
All the while Simple John yelled: “Uh’AAaaa, Uh’AAaaaaa.” Tears returned to his eyes and he shifted his large feet. “Uh’Aaaaa.” But when he saw Nicodemus hanging upside down and unhurt, he calmed.
Nicodemus was shocked to find himself still alive. “John, what have you done?” he asked with as much calm as he could muster. “Where did you get this construct? This is dangerous. Call the spell back into its parchment.”
John shook his head. “Typhon said Nico no go. Said use parchments to stop Nico until Typhon comes or until Typhon sends Fellwroth. Fellwroth is red-eyes-man. Typhon visit with emerald to watch Nico sleep every four autumns. This should be an autumn when Typhon comes to watch Nicosleep. And Typhon promised he’d come when I used big parchments. And if Typhon can’t come, he send Fellwroth of the red eyes.”
“John, you’re not making sense.”
John shook his head. “Typhon said Nico no go. He needs to watch Nico sleep every four years. Touches the scar with the emerald. Typhon said he would come, but there must be something stopping him. It’s Fellwroth red-eyes-man that’s coming, then. Typhon says use parchments to stop Nico until Fellwroth comes.”
“John,” Nicodemus cried, “you don’t know what you’re talking about! John, help me!”
The big man shook his head. “Red beard, black shiny skin, that’s Typhoneus…says also put this”—he held up the other parchment—“until he sends Fellwroth of the red eyes. He says he fix us; he makes Nico not go.” With that John reached into the second parchment and pulled out a spell.
At first, only golden Numinous runes could be seen, but then the spell congealed into a brown and green construct. The thing was as large as a man’s head. Its fat, mucus-covered body resembled a toad with its stomach torn out. Its bulging eyes shone with animal greed. A foot-long tongue flopped from its toothless mouth. Nicodemus yelled in wordless terror.
John was yelling too, but he did not let go of the spell. “Nico not cry. Simple John has to.” He grabbed Nicodemus’s free arm to stop him from struggling and held out the slimy text. Like an infant searching for a nipple, the construct reached for Nicodemus’s head.