Authors: Blake Charlton
Now it was Nicodemus’s turn to be puzzled. “What did he learn from the book?”
The ghost cast a reply and then looked at his feet. “He
would not say.
”
Nicodemus suddenly understood. “You fear that whatever upset the previous cacographer will upset me and I won’t replenish your spectral codex.”
“
Please don’t be angry. If you do not help us, we will deconstruct.
”
“I see your dilemma. How about a trade? I will replenish your codex now and promise to return in the future. In exchange, you will let me engage the Bestiary.”
The ghost peered into Nicodemus’s face and then composed his script. “Yes,
that could work. Let us talk more after you refresh our text. But remember, if it is after sunrise when you wake, I will not be here. Wait for night and do not build a fire or cast any harsh illuminating text. I will return.
”
“Agreed,” Nicodemus said, and turned to regard the spectral codex that lay within its stone vault. Its brasswork gleamed dully.
“I do this to demonstrate my good faith.” He opened the book and planted his hand on the open page.
E
VERYTHING BLAZED WHITE
and then faded into black. Suddenly Nicodemus was not himself. Nor was he in his own time.
He was a young Chthonic male pausing from his early evening spell work. His bare feet stood on the newly built tower bridge. Its stones were still warm from the summer sunlight. He looked east. Before him stretched the dusty expanse of felled trees and rock piles.
Soon they would build towers there as well, and the city would grow even larger. Farther away stood the moonlit mountains. In the middle of the sheer rock face gaped a wide tunnel that ran into the mountain.
He remembered that long ago his ancestors had built that tunnel to escape the underworld. But sometimes, blueskin raiders had come screaming out of the tunnel to steal food, tools, and females. His people had led counterstrikes down the tunnel to kill the offending blueskins and take others as slaves.
But now a truce had been made. Wards had been written within the cave mouth to restrict passage. His people had filled the entrance with their metaspells, and the blueskins had matched this with thousands of their digging tortoise constructs. Now only official delegations could pass between the upperworld and the underworld.
In celebration of this truce, his people were decorating the rockface. A carving of ivy leaves was to represent his people’s metaspells because ivy, like his kind, grew from stony soil and could climb to great heights. A carving of a tortoise shell was to represent the blueskin’s war constructs.
The truce required both his people and the blueskins to meet at the cave mouth every year to renew the agreements of the peace. Some of his people were displeased with the truce; they wanted easier access to the Heaven Tree homestead.
But most were content, and the yearly renewal of the truce was a celebrated holiday. Some even spoke of building a bridge out to the tunnel.
However, a growing number of elders—remembering the horrors they had seen before they left the underworld—argued that they should abandon the Heaven Tree and collapse the tunnel. Only this, they said, would end all contact with the blueskins and so permanently stop the raids.
Without warning the world again dissolved into blinding white light. For a moment Nicodemus was himself again…but then everything changed.
He was now a Chthonic elder standing on a sunlit bridge in a completed Starhaven. Many years had passed. Before him stretched the Spindle Bridge. It reached out from Starhaven to land against the solid cliff face. He could see the ivy pattern and the tortoise pattern carved into the rock.
But the tunnel was gone. The bridge ran into solid stone. He tried to remember what had happened to the tunnel but found his mind was filled with terror. He shifted his palette limb underneath his tunic and looked westward. Moving across the oak savanna were two red squares, each a mile in width and length.
Sunlight glinted off helmets and spear points. These were the Fifth and the Ninth Neosolar Legions. They had come to lay siege to Starhaven.
He pulled his palette closer and cursed the sunlight. The hour had come at last. In a matter of days, he and all his people would die.
“Nicodemus!” someone called faintly. “Niiicooodeeemus!”
Abruptly Nicodemus was himself again, standing in the small Chthonic cellar. His hand was hovering above the living codex that held the Wrixlan ghosts. Tulki was gone. Looking back, he saw sunlight shining on the steps that led up to the ruined Chthonic outpost. It was morning.
“Niiicooodeeemus!” His name came again from a distant female voice.
His heart tightened. How had she found him? He was supposed to be hidden.
Then he remembered the Seed of Finding. The last signal text it would have cast would have been from just outside the ruins. She must have reached that spot and started calling out.
“Niiicooodeeeeeemus!” she yelled again.
Deirdre!
Nicodemus woke to see Deirdre padding down the cellar stairs. A lone sunbeam had slipped through the tattered ceiling to land on the steps. As the druid walked through the light, the sword strapped to her back glinted solar white. She was holding up the front of her robes to make a basket; on the pale cloth rested small pieces of darkness. Nicodemus picked up the Index and went to her.
“Clear sky, cold and windy,” she whispered as they squatted by the nearby wall. “Reminds me of the bright autumn days in the Highlands.” She had folded her legs so the nest of blackberries sat in her lap.
Nicodemus set down the Index and watched with single-minded anticipation as her dark fingers extracted a mound of berries and overturned them into his cupped hands.
“John will need some too,” he said.
On the other side of the cellar, the big man was curled up on Nicodemus’s cloak. Getting him to sleep that morning had been a struggle.
Shortly after Nicodemus had brought Deirdre and John back to the ruins, the big man’s wits had returned with a squall of terror and tears. At first, he had screamed every time Nicodemus had touched him. But eventually he let the younger man pull him into an embrace. Then John had begun to repeat the name “Devin…Devin…Devin…” over and over.
Nicodemus had wept with him until exhaustion pulled them both into sleep.
“I set several rabbit snares,” Deirdre whispered, feeding herself a berry between words. “With luck, evening will see us with dinner.” She searched Nicodemus’s face. “Now that we know more about the Chthonics, have you discovered anything about that dream you told me of—the one of Fellwroth surrounded by ivy and turtles? Any clue where the monster’s true body is now?”
Nicodemus shook his head. “I thought the body must be in a cave where the Spindle Bridge meets the mountain. There must be some connection to the ivy and hexagon patterns carved into the mountain face. But in the Chthonic visions, I saw that the cave into the mountain had disappearedafter the Spindle Bridge was built. And Shannon probed the rock before the bridge and found nothing. There must be some other connection. It’s frustrating. I can’t consult the ghosts again until tonight.”
He popped a blackberry into his mouth and stared down at the tattoos that covered his hands and forearms. It was strange to think about Garkex and the other night terrors being written across his body.
Deirdre was still studying him. “The dreams might not matter. We’ll be safe when we reach my goddess’s ark. When will you be ready to run to Gray’s Crossing?”
Nicodemus paused, a berry at his lips. “When I met the golem, it was coming up from Gray’s Crossing.”
He had told Deirdre about his strange dreams, his encounter with Fellwroth, and his dealings with the Chthonic ghost. But he had not told her what Fellwroth had said about the struggle between two factions—one demonic, one divine—to breed a Language Prime spellwright.
“Fellwroth must be watching Gray’s Crossing,” he continued. “He might anticipate our trying to reach your goddess’s ark.”
Deirdre shook her head; her raven hair gleamed even in the half-light. “A dozen armed devotees—two of them druids—guard the stone. And it’s well hidden; Fellwroth wouldn’t know where to find it.”
Her wide eyes widened; her dark cheeks flushed darker. “Nicodemus, we
are so close now. My goddess can sense you nearing. She longs to protect you.”
Nicodemus put the blackberry in his mouth and chewed it slowly. “Deirdre, who is your goddess?”
A soft smile curled her lips. “She is Boann of the Highlands, not a powerful deity, but a water goddess of unsurpassed beauty, a dweller of the secret brooks and streams that flow among the boulders and the heather.”
Nicodemus thought about what Fellwroth had told him. “Does she have many Imperials—those that look like us—in her service?”
“A few,” she said, eating another berry. “My family has done so for time out of mind. In the Lowlands, my cousins serve her. But you must understand that she is a Dralish deity. The Lornish occupy the Highlands still. Those of us holding to the old ways must hide—”
Nicodemus interrupted. “Does she direct your family as to whom they might marry?”
This made Deirdre’s eyebrows sink. “We never marry without her blessing.”
“Is she trying to produce a Language Prime spellwright?”
“Language Prime?”
“Maybe she called it the First Language. Have you heard of that?”
Deirdre only frowned.
“No, you haven’t. But did your goddess know that Typhon had crossed the ocean? Has she been struggling against him for long?”
“Nicodemus, what are you driving at?”
He looked down. “Nothing. Only thinking aloud.”
Fellwroth had said that those opposing the Disjunction—the Alliance of Divine Heretics—would kill Nicodemus on sight. But Nicodemus distrusted the monster. If the Alliance wanted a Language Prime spellwright so badly, they might be willing to help Nicodemus recover the missing part of himself in return for his service.
For this reason, Nicodemus hoped that Deirdre’s goddess was a member of the Alliance. Clearly Deirdre did not want him dead; she could have broken his neck long ago.
The problem was that Deirdre didn’t seem to know about Language Prime or whether her goddess was a member of this Alliance.
But then again, she might know more than she was letting on. Nicodemus needed a way to learn more about her.
Suddenly the blackberry in his mouth became sour. He knew what he had to do. “Deirdre,” he said softly, “Kyran is dead.”
She looked away. “I know.” The room’s faint light glowed on her smooth cheeks and accentuated her youthful appearance.
Nicodemus continued, “He died fighting Fellwroth in the compluvium…saved my life. He gave me this script.” Holding out his empty right hand, Nicodemus pulled Kyran’s final spell from his chest with his left. “He asked that I give it to you.”
Deirdre looked down at his right hand and then away. “Read it to me,” she whispered.
Nicodemus’s heart began to strike. “I’d rather you take it.”
Again she looked at his right hand and shook her head. “Please, read it to me.”
A silent pause.
“Deirdre,” Nicodemus said gently, “you’re illiterate.”
She looked at him as if he had turned into a frog. “I learned to read fifty years before you were born.”
“Not mundane language, magical language. You can’t read even the common magical languages. You’re not a druid.”
She started to say one thing and then stopped. Started to say another, stopped. “How did you know?” she managed at last.
“When I told you of Kyran’s spell, you looked at my right hand.” He nodded to the hand in question, which he had stretched out as if offering something.
She frowned “And?”
“I’m holding the text in my left.”
“T
HERE WERE OTHER
clues,” Nicodemus added. “Your diction is wrong. You refer to spells and text as ‘magic’—no spellwright would use such a general term. You never unbuttoned your sleeves when we were fleeing Starhaven. You claimed to wield a different kind of magic, but any kind of spellwriting would require you to look at your arms. And then there’s your greatsword. A man of six feet would need both hands just to lift that weapon. You toss it about as if it were a feather.”
Deirdre closed her eyes and pressed a slender hand to her cheek. “Only the druids were called to the convocation. I couldn’t get into Starhaven without the disguise.”
Nicodemus said nothing.
She looked at the stairwell. The sunbeam was moving up the steps. Maybe three hours had passed since midday. “I am Boann’s avatar. Do you know what that means?”
“Theology was thought to be wasted on cacographers. I only know what they say in the stories.”
She nodded. “Deities sometimes invest worthy devotees with portions of their souls. Just as golems carry the spirits of their authors, we avatars carry the souls of our deities. If we die before our divine souls can disengage, then part of the divinity dies with us. And those who carry souls of the high gods and goddesses become the heroes of your stories—warriors with impenetrable skin, bards with hypnotic voices, and so on.”
She smiled sadly. “Boann is nothing so powerful. My gifts are simple: I do not age, I heal with extraordinary speed, and for a brief time I may possess the strength of ten or eleven men.”
Nicodemus was confused. “Why did you come looking for me?”
“What I said before is true. Last spring, Boann ordered me to attend the Starhaven convocation where I would find a ‘treasure wrapped in black.’ You asked if she knew of Typhon. Perhaps she did and didn’t tell me. Now that I think on it, she must have known the demon had hidden you here. Why else send me?”
Nicodemus glanced back to make sure the Index still lay behind him. “Deirdre, I didn’t tell you everything Fellwroth told me.” He explained what he knew about Language Prime and the monster’s claim about two factions striving to breed a Language Prime spellwright.