Authors: Blake Charlton
Somehow Kyran yanked Nicodemus to his feet. “For Deirdre,” he grunted, and cast a common language sentence into Nicodemus’s shoulder.
The now writhing golem was trying desperately to pull the burning thorny branches from his flesh. His right arm had melted down to a thin, useless stalk.
“Don’t be like me, boy.” Kyran pulled Nicodemus away. “Be anything: be wild, be saintly, be wicked. Love all or love none, but don’t be like me.”
Suddenly the war-weight gargoyle was before Nicodemus. “Get him to safety at any cost,” Kyran commanded.
Before Nicodemus could protest, the hawk-headed gargoyle grabbed hold of him and—as if he weighed no more than a kitten—hoisted him into the air. Nicodemus clutched the Index to his chest.
An inhuman scream turned Nicodemus’s eyes back to see the metal golem. The monster had extinguished the blue flames and was now on his feet and charging. A long Magnus lash glittered in his waxy hands. Kyran moved to meet the creature, blue fire again blazing from his fists.
“Kyran, no!” Nicodemus yelled.
With a vicious strike, Fellwroth brought his Magnus lash around, tearing through Kyran from shoulder to hip.
Nicodemus cried out.
The golem charged forward and raised his Magnus lash to strike at the gargoyle.
But then Nicodemus was in the air, falling at tremendous speed. His stomach clenched.
The hawk-headed gargoyle had leaped from the wall.
Nicodemus had only a glimpse of the impluvium’s glassy surface before they splashed into it. The moment the gargoyle’s feet hit water, its arms lifted Nicodemus up over its head to reduce the shock of impact. Even so, the crash of water seemed to jar the wits from Nicodemus’s mind.
His first lucid thought, ludicrously, was for the Index’s safety. Hetightened his grip on the book even though the water was surely destroying its pages.
His next thought was of the golem. He opened his eyes and felt the shock of icy water on his eyeballs.
The gargoyle’s weight was fast pulling them down into the impluvium’s depths. But after craning his neck around, Nicodemus could see a blurry white column of bubbles created as the golem hit the surface.
Suddenly a stone face covered with fish scales loomed before Nicodemus. The aquatic gargoyle’s rough hands grabbed hold of Nicodemus’s robes and pulled. Then dozens more of the tiny hands set upon him, pulling him somewhere. He fought the urge to scream.
Above him the metal golem was sinking fast, its white cloak billowing in the water.
A high-pitched whine filled the water and abruptly many gargoyle hands were shoving Nicodemus into a dark hole. He fought to escape but there were too many.
They stuffed him into a small, black space. A sheet of metal closed above him and there followed a second whine.
In complete darkness, Nicodemus prepared to die.
But the whine grew louder and then Nicodemus was falling, tumbling, banging against the sides of some long tube. He shouted and felt the cold water fill his mouth. The tube began to bend and he slid along its algae-coated bottom.
Suddenly he fell into a mixture of air and water. Something was roaring like a waterfall.
He splashed down into what seemed to be a waist-deep underground river. His mouth opened and drew in long gulps of air.
He let the powerful current pull him along. Slowly the waterfall’s roar faded and he could hear things moving in the darkness above him—small, rustling things that spoke with creaking voices.
And then, without warning, he was outside. Above him shone a crystalline night sky. Around him stood a forest of dark towers. A few bats flitted about in the chilly air. Nearly two hundred feet below stretched the weed-covered gardens and stone walkways of the Chthonic Quarter.
The gargoyles had dropped him into an aqueduct, Nicodemus realized, as he floated into another tunnel. The icy current carried him northwest through several towers and across the high aqueducts until it dropped him into a massive brass cistern in the Spirish Quarter.
Whispering thanks to every deity and gargoyle he knew, Nicodemus pulled himself out of the water and ran.
At first he fled aimlessly. He feared that Fellwroth might have followed him down the aqueduct. But once sure that he had escaped, Nicodemus snuck into an old janitorial closet to catch his breath and dry off.
To his shock, he discovered that the Index was miraculously dry. He turned the codex over again and again, looking for some reason why it had not so much as a damp page.
He found no clue. But as he turned the book over, the thrill of escape faded. The keloid scars on his neck began to burn, and his hands began to shake.
At first he thought only of Kyran’s horrible death. But then he remembered the sentence the druid had cast into his shoulder before dying.
He pulled the line free and translated it.
Reading Kyran’s final words made him feel numb for a while. Then he thought of Deirdre and then of Devin. He thought of John and of Magister Shannon. He thought of his father, branding his infant self.
When the tears came, he did not try to stop them.
Hugging the Index to his chest, Nicodemus peered around the tapestry he was hiding behind.
He stood at Starhaven’s westernmost point, in the main hall of its gatehouse. The academy’s entrance lay beyond. Two guards, both women, paced the drawbridge.
Each woman was casting, from her waist, a white sentence that held a spellbook open beside her. This action, called “floating a spellbook,” gave each spellwright quick access to her book’s prewritten offensive language.
Slinking back behind the tapestry, Nicodemus closed his eyes and envisioned the emerald he had seen in his dreams. The stone was a small, flawless teardrop. At the gem’s center glowed a verdant spark. This was the missing part of himself.
He shuddered.
If not for this gem, he wouldn’t be cacographic. More important, Kyran and Devin wouldn’t be dead.
In his imagination, the gem shone brighter and his determination to recover the missing part of his mind grew. Summoning this mental image was how he had stopped the tears in the janitorial station. It was how he would prevent them now.
He let the emerald’s light burn away all his sorrow, all his doubt, all his weakness. He must find a way to regain the emerald, to complete himself.
He felt his belt-purse for Deirdre’s Seed of Finding. Once away from the stronghold, he would tear the root from the artifact to let the druid know where he was.
Again glancing from behind the tapestry, Nicodemus inspected the two guards. The younger one had long black hair and a pale face. She was unknown to him. But the elder guard’s silver hair and dark face were vaguely familiar. If he remembered correctly, she was one of Starhaven’s foremost Numinous authors.
Biting his lip, Nicodemus leaned back into his hiding place. Perhaps he should chance a return to the Fool’s Ladder; he was never going to escapeStarhaven through the front gate. To get past these guards he’d have to be invisible.
An idea grew in his mind.
Perhaps he could find an invisibility subtext so simple that he could repair any misspellings the corrupted Index might introduce into it.
He opened the book. At first he could not make sense of what he saw. It seemed to be the chapter of an old treatise, but why it had appeared was a mystery.
From Towards a
Uniform Spelling
by Gaius Rufeus
Many today argue that tolorence for alternative spellings encurages creativity. I conseed that for many texts there are a few alternative spellings that are not only functional but also superior to the conventional spelling. But the number of these fortunate mistakes is dwarfed by the number of alternative spellings (or we should call them misspellings) that are nonfunctional and, in certin cases, dangerous. If wizards are to survive as useful members of the Neosolar Empire then a standard for…
Nicodemus frowned. He had been thinking of subtexts, not spelling. The Index was supposed to provide information on whatever subject he wanted to find. He reached to turn the page but then stopped.
Maybe the Index was correct: he hadn’t been thinking about subtexts themselves; he had been wondering if he could manage to rewrite a subtext.
He reread the page. So what if a few misspells worked? He’d known that for years. He couldn’t deliberately misspell a subtext; the text might flay his face off.
Irritated, he flipped the page to shut the book up. The sheet he turned to contained a treatise on self-doubt and its effect on spellwriting. “I’m supposed to be reading you,” he half-whispered, half-growled.
The book didn’t answer.
Nicodemus planted a palm on the page and sent his mind flying up into the book’s starry sky of spells.
From the darkness, three comet-like subtexts approached, each presenting an explanation of its function.
The first glowed green. It was a long and common language spell named madide. According to its description, the subtext blurred the image of those who cast it, making them difficult to see or strike. There was also a warning:
Note that madide’s inverted structure prevents most spellwriters from seeing this subtext; however, a spellwright posessing mastery of the comon langeuge may glean the rune sequenses and hense visualize the subtext.
That wouldn’t do; the guards had certainly mastered the common languages.
The second spell shone Numinous gold. Nicodemus recognized the latere subtext—a favorite of Magister Shannon, who sometimes demonstrated a love of practical jokes rare for a grand wizard. This spell formed a halo that continuously showered light-bending runes on its wearer. Latere-casters became invisible so long as they remained still. Slow movement made the air shimmer; rapid movement revealed glimpses of the caster’s legs or arms. More important, not even a grand wizard could glean its presence.
“This subtext is truly wonderful,” Master Shannon had once mockingly lectured. “For when one packs a friend’s shoes full of snow, one does want to be there when he puts them on.”
Fear and guilt assailed Nicodemus as he thought of Shannon imprisoned.
But with grim determination, he focused on recovering the emerald and forced himself to consider the latere subtext. It might work; he would have to move slowly and be sure not to stand where the guards might walk. However, it was very complex.
The third spell burned with the violet light of the Index’s language. It was written in a terse, self-reflexive style and possessed a brief description:
The words of sceaduganga cover the body, allowing our authors to walk unseen in shadow but not bright light. It deadins the sound of footsteps.
This was precisely what Nicodemus needed. With a flash, the sceaduganga spell crashed into his mind.
Having gotten what he sought, Nicodemus removed his hand from the Index and felt his mind drop back into his skull. As before, the transition from book to brain made his thoughts feel strangely confined.
Nicodemus closed the Index. On the gate, the two guards were discussing an ongoing bookworm infection. Apparently there were supposed to be other guards on the front gate, but the provost had pulled them away to help hunt the worms.
One of the stronghold’s cats now prowled the other side of the corridor. Nicodemus glared at the feline, willing it not to come his way and by purring reveal his presence. Another breeze set the torches to guttering.
After a long breath, Nicodemus turned his mind to the sceaduganga spell. Because the text had come from the corrupted Index, it was already slightly misspelled. And for that reason, Nicodemus concentrated on keeping his cacographic mind from further distorting the newly learned spell. After another long breath, he set to writing the subtext along his right forearm.
Although each violet rune required a surprising amount of energy, writing the spell took only moments. When finished, the sceaduganga solidified into a transparent cylinder on his palm. He frowned at his first attempt in a new language. Most likely it was misspelled. He cast the text into the air, expecting it to crash onto the floor.
But it did not fall.
It shot upward and smashed against the ceiling. “Fiery blood!” he whispered as violet sentence fragments snowed about him. His second attempt behaved like a proper misspell and plummeted to the ground. The third spell shot across the corridor to strike the cat and render it invisible. The rats wouldn’t like that at all.
The fourth spell crashed onto the floor like the second, and the fifth deconstructed before leaving his hand. Nicodemus’s face grew hot with frustration. He badly wanted to break something other than another sceaduganga subtext.
Suddenly his keloid came alive with pain. Clapping a hand onto the scars, he discovered that they were almost as hot as boiling water. This had happened twice before when he was making his way to the front gate. It made him worry about the last thing the emerald had said: “Beware the scar; it will betray you to Fellwroth.”
What that meant, Nicodemus couldn’t imagine. And he couldn’t waste time thinking about it now. He needed to get out of Starhaven.
So he took slow breaths and waited for the scar to cool. When it did, he bent down to inspect the decaying halves of his last two subtext attempts. Both spells had split at the same point in their primary sequence. Undoubtedly, he had made the same cacographic error in both.
“Los damn my cacography,” he hissed, fighting a fresh wave of self-hatred. “If only I had that emerald!”
He forced himself to think logically. Was there a way to rewrite the spell to avoid the commands that contained difficult spellings?
He grunted. Perhaps there was. But that would mean deliberately respelling, deliberately misspelling. His whole life he had waged war on his cacography. True, intentionally misspelling the shielding spell back in the Index’s chamber had increased his control of that text. But now he was considering something more egregious—willfully composing a misspell.