Authors: Blake Charlton
As the woman hurried through the door, Kale appeared. He was chewing his lower lip. A bad sign. “What is it, Kale?”
“Word from the librarians, Magistra. One of Starhaven’s most valuable artifacts is missing.”
“Destroyed by a bookworm?” she asked.
The secretary shook his head. “It was in a secure chamber and the Main Library was never infested.”
Amadi closed her eyes and took a long breath. “Let me guess: either Shannon or Nicodemus was the last one to use this artifact.”
Kale nodded. “There’s more. The artifact is a reference codex called the Index; it can access all text stored in Starhaven. And whoever has the artifact has looked up the touch spell.”
“And how do we know this?”
“Every copy of the touch spell in the academy is now misspelled.”
Amadi frowned. “By accessing texts through this artifact the user is misspelling them?”
Kale nodded. “And all the misspelled touch scrolls are infectious. They cause manuscripts touching them to misspell. An entire pedagogical library in the Marfil Tower has been destroyed.”
“Nicodemus!” Amadi growled. “If the boy accesses a text in the Stacks or the Main Library, he could destroy all of Starhaven’s holdings.”
Kale nodded again.
Amadi swore. “First the bookworm infestation, now this. Chaos incarnate has come to Starhaven.”
“Magistra…are you saying—”
“Do you doubt it, Kale? Think of the disorder that has spread across Starhaven. Think of the murders, the deaths, the corruption. Think of the scar—an Inconjunct breaking the Braid. The boy seems destined to spread chaos.”
Kale took a long breath. “We cannot be certain the counter-prophecy is coming to pass.”
“Cannot be certain, but we now have enough evidence that we must act.”
She made for the door. “I will question the librarians. I want to learn more about this artifact. You will go to the Erasmine Tower and tell the onduty officers what has happened. If we don’t catch the boy, his mind will rot the pages from our books as a tumor rots flesh. They must wake the provost and tell him that most likely we’ve found the Storm Petrel.”
F
ELLWROTH, MORE COMFORTABLE
now in a new clay golem, stole through the forest south of Starhaven. Two hours until dawn. The air was cold, the sky black. The strengthening wind roared through the woods.
Roughly an hour ago, the signaling texts from Nicodemus’s keloid had ceased entirely. At the time, Fellwroth had still been forming a new golem and so had missed the chance to determine the boy’s location more precisely.
However, it was clear that the last signal had come from somewhere in this forest—hence Fellwroth’s current, systematic combing of the mountainside. Presently, he followed a deer trail into an elm thicket. He had hoped the keloid’s signal texts would recommence, but now it seemed the boy’s new protector was blocking them indefinitely.
Here the wind was producing a continuous snow of falling leaves. Fellwroth scowled; without another keloid signal, his current search was unlikely to reveal anything other than more autumnal foliage.
A few hours ago he had spoken to a subtextualized Nicodemus on the road to Gray’s Crossing. Had his words convinced the boy? Likely not. If Nicodemus meant to surrender, the whelp should have returned to Starhaven by now, and none of Fellwroth’s rewritten gargoyles had reported such.
Fellwroth snatched a falling leaf out of the air and wondered why Nicodemus had not accepted his offer.
Only two possibilities suggested themselves: first, threats against Nicodemus’s life might be insufficient to win the boy’s surrender; or second, the whelp might feel safe now that he had a protector to block the keloid’s signals.
Fellwroth crushed the leaf and considered who might be concealing Nicodemus. Not a deity; he would have sensed another divine presence by now. Nor could it be the girl druid acting alone.
Perhaps it did not matter who was hiding Nicodemus. Perhaps he could threaten something other than the boy’s life.
He looked toward Starhaven. The dark elm trees blocked everything from view but the lofty Erasmine Spire. A slow smile pulled on his pale lips as a plan formed in his mind.
He would need to use his true body, and it would take a day to move everything into place. Even so, the plan was perfect.
The leaves were falling faster now. Fellwroth laughed. He knew of at least one thing Nicodemus valued more than his life.
“Y
OU GAVE HIM
access to the Index?” Amadi squawked.
Shannon was sitting calmly on his prison cell cot. The guards had written a weblike censoring spell around the old man’s head, blocking him from all magical language. Now his blindness would be complete.
Though he must have been exhausted, the old wizard wore a calm expression. “Without my anti-golem spell, Nicodemus would have been helpless.”
“Magister, the provost himself suspects Nicodemus is the Storm Petrel, the champion of chaotic language. I can have no more stories of your clay—”
Shannon learned forward. Thick Magnus texts kept his wrists and legs spellbound to the wall, but there was enough slack on the fettering spells to make Amadi step backward.
“Do you find anything strange in the Drum Tower?” he asked. “Maybe not clay, but any earthen metal, granite or steel or—”
“Dust,” she said automatically. “There was a smaller mound of splinters, but dust was all about the common room and especially in a pile with a torn white sheet.”
Shannon’s blank eyes widened. “The arm I cut off the clay golem had a white sleeve.”
Amadi shook her head. “Magister, this tale of golems is too much to swallow. Texts from the ancient continent?”
“Amadi, by naming him the Storm Petrel, you admit that the bonds holding the demons to the ancient continent are loosening. And yet you refuse to accept the possibility that magic from the ancient continent has already crossed the ocean.”
Amadi said nothing.
“If you had guarded the boy properly, none of this would have happened,” Shannon said sternly. “The least you can do now is—”
“Enough,” Amadi snapped. “I did guard the boy properly given the bookworm infestation. You slipped him the key needed to escape the Drum Tower. It is you who must clear his name. And there’s only one way to do that: help us find the boy. Magister, please. Help us recover the Index and capture the Storm Petrel.”
He scowled.
Amadi took a long breath. Perhaps the old man was right. Perhaps she should not have withdrawn the guards from the Drum Tower. If the provost discovered that she had wasted the chance to contain Nicodemus, she might soon join Shannon in a prison cell. “Can you find the boy?” she asked patiently. “Do you know where he might be?”
He shook his head. “If I did, I wouldn’t take you to him. By invoking the counter-prophecy, you have ensured that he cannot be safe in Starhaven. The provost is likely to censor magical literacy out of the boy the instant he’s found.”
“But you must have taught him a cipher for a broadcast spell.”
“If I did, I should never use it,” Shannon snapped. “You could pretend to pardon me or even stage a prison escape. You could watch me then and see if I go to him. But I will never seek him out so long as I have the slightest suspicion that you are following me.”
Amadi began to pace the tiny cell. “Why do you protect the boy?”
“Have you considered that he might truly be the Halcyon?”
“What under heaven could suggest that he is the champion of order in language?” she asked. “His cacographic mind that is infecting the entire stronghold with misspells? His keloid that symbolizes increasing chaos? The death and ruin that follow him as a storm follows a petrel at sea?”
“Open your eyes, Amadi! A construct of ancient language was murdering my students one by one to reach him. Who else could bring ancient language to this continent but a demon?”
Amadi pursed her lips.
The old man continued. “Amadi, it is this demonic construct that has led you to suspect me wrongly. A demonic construct that has you worrying about the counter-prophecy when you should be worrying about the true one.”
Amadi opened her mouth, but a sharp knock at the cell door interrupted her. “Enter,” she called. The door swung wide to reveal one of the guards, a short man with a curly red beard.
“What is it?” Amadi demanded.
“Message from your secretary,” the guard replied and looked down at a green paragraph in his hands.
“Magistra,” he read, “the druids Deirdre and Kyran cannot be found. The druids of the Silent Blight delegation claim no knowledge of their disappearance.” The guard looked up. “It’s signed by Magister Kale.”
“Los’s fiery blood!” Amadi swore. “What else can go wrong?”
As Nicodemus followed the ghostly Chthonic down into the ruined village, he reviewed everything he knew about ghostwriting.
He knew it was something powerful spellwrights did when nearing death. He knew the process involved an advanced form of what Shannon had called impressing: a complex Numinous matrix was written within a ghostwriter’s head; over time the matrix became a magical copy of the ghostwriter’s mind. A textual body was then written around this magical mind and never allowed outside of the author’s living body. Eventually, author and text became one being.
Wizards ghostwrote in Numinous, and the few ghostwriters Nicodemus had seen glowed golden from heel to head.
Nicodemus also knew that when ghostwriters died, their ghosts lived on in a text-preserving resting place. Starhaven’s ghosts dwelled below the stronghold in the necropolis.
Nicodemus also remembered that there were several types of misspelled ghosts. A “ghast” was a ghost that attacked other texts or the spellwrights who tended the necropolis. A “ghoul” was a ghost that refused to leave its body, often resulting in a half-animated corpse.
Fortunately, the ghost walking ahead of Nicodemus was not misspelled. Though transparent, its image and textual integrity seemed uncorrupted—a shocking feat for prose that had to be nearly a thousand years old.
Presently, Nicodemus was following the ghost down a steep, crumbling stairway to the ruined Chthonic village. Above them a growing wind was blustering through the trees.
“Magister,” Nicodemus said to the ghost as they descended, “How should I address you?”
The Chthonic soul stopped to smile at Nicodemus and hand him three purple sentences. They read, “
You may call me Tulki. In our language, ‘Tulki’ is the masculine form of the word for ‘interpreter.’ In life, I was an ambassador between our people and your ancestors.
”
When Nicodemus looked up from this message, he saw the ghost studying him with wide amber eyes. Tulki formed another two sentences in hisarm and held them out. “
I am assuming your ancestors were of the Neosolar Empire. You wear the black robes.
”
After reading this, Nicodemus hugged the Index closer to his chest. The Neosolar Empire had slaughtered the Chthonics with the help of a young Numinous Order. “I was born Spirish,” he said.
Tulki nodded and wrote his reply: “
Yes, I realize the Neosolar Empire collapsed long ago. I heard once that it was modeled after the Solar Empire on your ancient continent. I would like to have learned more. But now, follow me.
”
The ghost’s silken ponytail flew over his shoulder as he turned and loped forward on all three limbs. Nicodemus followed the soul into the rubble and ivy.
As they went, the ghost tossed a paragraph over his shoulder. Nicodemus nearly slipped as he hurried to catch and read the passage. “
You should know that our magical languages will be rough on your skin. When those constructs leave your body, they will score welts on you. Nothing permanent. That is why Chimera, our goddess, gave my people such delicate and pale skin. When alive, we could painlessly write and remove spells from our skin. But this made our hides weak. It was one reason why your ancestors eradicated us so easily.
”
Reading this made Nicodemus slow down.
The ghost stopped and looked back at Nicodemus before tossing him a short text. “
Don’t be alarmed; I am not angry. I assume you are a scholar as well. Aren’t you here for research?
”
After he finished reading, Nicodemus looked up. “Research?”
Tulki quickly offered another paragraph. “
You are a eugrapher researching eugraphic languages, no? Both our languages—Wrixlan and Pithan—are eugraphic. What else would bring you here? You have a living tome there in your hand.
”
Nicodemus looked at the Index. “Living tome?”
The ghost frowned as he produced another reply. “
That Index’s parchment is kept alive by its First Language prose. Maybe you don’t know: our languages can be written only on living skin. Your constructs chose to store themselves on your body rather than in the Index; they will be much stronger for it. That is the beauty of our languages: we can make our bodies textual.
”
Nicodemus looked from the Index to the ghost. “I don’t understand.”
The ghost’s chest rose and fell in a silent sigh before he held out a reply: “
Your living tome taught you Wrixlan, one of our languages, because you are a eugrapher, yes?
”
“I am a cacographer.”
Tulki shook his head as he wrote a response. He flicked it to Nicodemus. “That
is what our last visitor said so long ago. But consider that all eugraphers misspell in the wizardly languages. They try to make the spelling logical. That iswhy your mind is attracted to Wrixlan; it is logical and therefore eugraphic. Do you not spell more accurately in Wrixlan
?”
“I…I did respell a subtext,” Nicodemus said and then stopped as something occurred to him. He looked back at his translation of the ghost’s message. Surprisingly, it seemed to have no misspellings. True, his disability prevented him from recognizing many misspelled words; however, when he translated in Numinous, he produced so many errors that even his cacographic mind could identify the resulting misspellings.