Authors: Blake Charlton
“I know about the golem,” she said curtly. “Blood of Los, but I know about the golem! And I have a day, maybe two, to prove that the creature exists or the provost will censor magical literacy out of my mind.”
The big man thought about this before nodding. “Nico and Magister have gone to attack the golem’s author in the Spindle Bridge.”
Amadi took a long breath. “That’s a long way off. And forming a party will take time.” She stopped. “You said ‘in’ the bridge?”
“Go there,” said John. “You will see what I mean. Only…” He paused. “Only take all your spellwrights…and all your strongest words.”
Nicodemus saw no dazzling flash, felt no rush of power. Everything seemed the same.
And yet, somehow, he knew exactly what to do. His right hand tightened around the emerald and his left landed on the opened page of the Index.
His mind flashed into the Index’s starry sky to collide with tirade—an epic Numinous-Magnus spell possessing an aggressive and self-reflexive style.
A scriptorium of grand wizards would have needed a year to craft such a versatile text without error.
But when Nicodemus forged within the emerald, perfectly formed sentences exploded into his hand and spilled down his arm. In the next heartbeat, he blazed from toe to tongue with violent language.
The spell’s dazzling glare illuminated Fellwroth’s white-robed figure. The creature’s hood had fallen during the fight, and Nicodemus looked on his enemy’s face.
Limp white hair hung down to Fellwroth’s thin shoulders. His pale skin shone with a dull sheen like maggot’s flesh. His smooth jaw, hollow cheeks, and snub nose seemed human but strangely asexual.
Between the creature’s pale lips opened a maw filled with a hundred quivering tendons. His eyes gleamed red. His forehead presented a golden rectangle of flowing Numinous sentences.
With a backhand slash, Fellwroth cast a spray of needle-like disspells.
But Nicodemus threw out both hands and cast his tirade. The spell produced a Numinous sheet that enveloped the disspells and then discharged a Magnus sphere. This latter passage smashed into Fellwroth’s chest and knocked the monster to the ground.
Nicodemus leaped up from the table and cast a thousand filaments of intertwined Numinous and Magnus.
Though sprawled on the floor, Fellwroth thrust his right hand upward to produce another spray of disspells.
But Nicodemus’s tirade was too cogent. The filaments darted through Fellwroth’s disspells and unwound.
The Magnus tirade coiled around the creature’s body, binding his arms to his side and wrapping his legs together. The Numinous tirade spun a web around the monster’s mind, cutting him off from all magical language.
“Hold!” Fellwroth cried. “I yield!”
N
ICODEMUS STOOD OVER
his spellbound foe expecting to feel triumphant. But the only emotion he felt was uncertainty.
Just what in the Creator’s name happened now?
Though tirade’s glow had faded, the remaining flamefly paragraphs provided ample light. Nicodemus looked around and saw Deirdre lying on the floor. She was struggling against the Magnus chains contracting around her neck.
Nicodemus caught the text between thumb and forefinger. Using the emerald, he gleaned the spell’s structure and edited two passages. A link snapped, and Deirdre yanked the thing from her throat.
Across the cavern, Shannon was lying motionless on the ground. Azure stood beside him, trying to pluck Fellwroth’s censoring text out of the old man’s mind.
Nicodemus thought for a moment and then extemporized a vinelike Numinous disspell. He cast it onto Shannon with an underhand toss. The disspell grew up the old man’s body and delicately removed the censoring text.
Groaning, Shannon began to stir.
A smile crept across Nicodemus’s face as his self-doubt began to fade. Without the emerald, he would have misspelled such a text within moments. He was whole now, complete.
“You cannot kill me,” a voice rasped. “Without me, Shannon will die.”
Nicodemus turned back to see a spellbound Fellwroth glaring at him with baleful red eyes.
“Only I can disspell the old wizard’s canker curses,” the creature rasped. “I spread dozens more throughout his gut. You need me. Only I can teach you how to remove them. Only I can teach you the meaning of Language Prime. You will never understand that life is made of magical text and—”
Nicodemus flicked a Magnus gag across the monster’s mouth.
He went to Shannon. The old man was on his hands and knees, vomiting another glowing pool of logorrhea bywords. Threads of blood now coiled within the silvery text.
It seemed that Fellwroth had told the truth about planting more curses in Shannon’s body.
“No,” the old linguist sputtered while trying to wave Nicodemus away. “Find out about the Disjunction. Question the monster.”
Nicodemus scowled. “Magister, hold still. I have to disspell your curses.”
“Later,” Shannon grunted. “The sentinels will be here soon. We must get Fellwroth to—”
“Magister!” Nicodemus snapped. His voice was firm though his hands had gone cold with fear. “Be quiet and hold still!”
The wizard sat on his haunches. “Very well, but hurry. We don’t have long.”
Nicodemus had to touch the old man to disspell the curses. But as he reached for his teacher’s cheek, his hand froze. It was shaking.
“I’m not the Storm Petrel anymore,” he whispered to himself. “I won’t curse him. I’m the Halcyon now.”
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He had the emerald. His doubt and fear should have vanished with his disability.
“I am the Halcyon now,” he assured himself and pressed his palm against his teacher’s cheek. The old wizard drew in a sharp breath.
Suddenly Nicodemus was looking through Shannon’s skin and sinew to the old man’s stomach. It was not pink flesh he saw, but the cyan glow of the organ’s Language Prime text. Five knobs stood out on the otherwise regular folds. They glowed brighter than the rest of the stomach.
Nicodemus set about disspelling the cankers. It was difficult work; Fellwroth had cruelly restructured Shannon’s Language Prime prose. Worse, the old man flinched every time Nicodemus made a major textual change.
“Is it done?” Shannon asked when Nicodemus removed his hand. The pain had made his face shine with sweat.
“I disspelled the worse curses around your stomach, but I saw smaller cankers on other organs. They’re not growing quickly. And I want to study them more before—”
“Disspell them later,” Shannon said while restoring Azure to her perch on his shoulder. “We haven’t long before Starhaven realizes we’re here and comes for us.”
Nicodemus helped his teacher stand. “Why do we need to worry about the other wizards?”
Shannon took a step on unsteady legs. “When the provost learns the truth about you, Nicodemus, we’ll land in the largest embroilment in the history of academic politics. If we want to avoid becoming the provost’s political prisoners, we must learn everything we can from that monster.”
Nicodemus turned to look at Fellwroth, still spellbound and lying on the floor.
Deirdre had picked herself up and gone to Boann’s ark. Fellwroth had written a Numinous shield around the object, but the avatar had forced her arms through the prose to lay her hands against the stone.
The contact seemed to be strengthening the ark; a red aura was growing around the stone and gradually deconstructing Fellwroth’s Numinous shield.
“Monster, I’ll have the truth from you.” Shannon limped over to stand above Fellwroth. “What do you know about the Disjunction?”
The creature glared with bloody eyes. When Shannon disspelled the gag, the thing laughed. “With what do you threaten me, Magister? Torture? Death? Neither will work. You, old goat, will never have my obedience.” The bloody eyes swiveled to Nicodemus. “But the boy might.”
Nicodemus frowned. “What are you playing at?”
Fellwroth grinned. “You may not need me to disspell the old man’s curses. But I command the forces of the Disjunction. Let me live and I will put all the resources of the demon-worshipers at your command. You can rule as a new emperor.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Nicodemus snapped. “I’d rather rot in hell than be your ally.”
The monster continued to stare at Nicodemus. “Think on it. You can’t go to the wizards; they will never overcome their belief that you’re the Storm Petrel. They will imprison and manipulate you. And you can’t trust that girl dressed up like a druid; she betrayed me and will betray you.”
Nicodemus’s heart grew cold. “Deirdre betrayed you?” he asked, remembering his first encounter with Fellwroth in the Drum Tower. The monster had acted surprised when Deirdre had resisted.
Fellwroth ignored this. “We do not have to serve the demons, Nicodemus. You can use me to resist the Disjunction. Think of the opportunities. I can show you how to find the demon-worshiping cults. I can help you eliminate them or manipulate them. Nicodemus, if you want to protect humanity, you cannot afford to destroy me.”
Nicodemus looked at Shannon.
The old linguist began to scratch Azure’s neck. He took a long moment before nodding.
“Very well,” Nicodemus said, turning back to the monster. “Tell me everything you know about the Disjunction.”
“T
ALK FAST
,” S
HANNON
said. “The sentinels will be here soon. How did Typhon cross the ocean?”
Fellwroth’s red eyes darted between teacher and student. “I am neither human nor a construct, something in between. By combining dust with demonic godspells, Los sought to create a new race to replace humanity. I was to be the first of the new men. He gave me life, but he never completed me. The Pandemonium was away at war on the coast, trying to stop the humans from escaping across the ocean. They had left Mount Calax emptybut for Los and my unfinished self. A party of powerful human avatars surprised the arch-demon. Sacrificing their lives, they combined their godspells to drain Los of all strength until he became solid rock. I was left incomplete and forgotten in Los’s mountain palace.”
Fellwroth shifted uncomfortably beneath the restraining Magnus sentences. “Having no devotees, the demons could not pursue humanity across the ocean. And only Los knew how to break their bonds to the earth of the ancient continent. But I am part of the ancient land—a being made from godspells and dirt. So when—centuries after Los’s demise—Typhoneus accidentally discovered me, he knew I could be his vessel to the new world. The demon implanted himself inside of me, made me his ark. We built a crude ship and sailed to this land.”
“And why did you cross?” Shannon asked. “Were you going to ferry the demons across one by one?”
Fellwroth shook his head. “Only an Imperial’s fluency in Language Prime can reanimate Los’s frozen body, so we crossed the ocean to breed one. Typhon had reconstructed the genealogy charts of the Imperial blood-lines. That’s how he created you, Nicodemus. And once we had your Language Prime fluency, we set about creating a dragon that could carry us back to the ancient continent.”
Nicodemus frowned. “Why not simply sail back?”
“Can’t be done,” Fellwroth replied. “Being trapped on the ancient continent has driven the demons mad with bloodlust. Mindless, they stalk the southern shores and will destroy any approaching ship. Typhon and I escaped by sail only because the demons did not imagine it was possible. Now their fury is whetted; even Typhon would not have survived a landing by ship.”
“So you need a dragon to fly over them?” Nicodemus asked.
The monster shook his head. “The flying helps, but it wouldn’t be sufficient. The dragon I completed could fly, but the demons would have torn it into pieces. A true dragon is more than wings and scales. True dragons can change the nature of a mind; they make their victims think unthinkable thoughts.”
Shannon exhaled. “A true dragon is a type of quaternary cognition spell?”
Fellwroth answered without taking his eyes from Nicodemus. “Precisely. Only a true dragon can travel past the demons to Mount Calax. There we could reanimate Los with your ability to spell in Language Prime. Los could then tame the feral demons and break their ties to the ancient continent. Then the War of Disjunction would begin at last.”
“So then why send your dragon to burn in Trillinon?” Shannon askedbefore laughing dryly. “No, let me guess. You killed Typhon before the dragon was finished. When you tried to complete the wyrm on your own, you failed to make it powerful enough to get past the demons. So you sent the dragon against Trillinon to cause havoc.”
Fellwroth bared his teeth at the grand wizard.
Shannon responded with a humorless smile. “So I am right. But tell me why you killed Typhon. Why sabotage your own plan?”
The monster hissed. “Typhon was a fool. The old goat was so bent upon reconstructing Los that he failed to see that I am Los’s legacy. He jeopardized my life for trifling matters. So when the emerald showed me how to kill him in the river, I did so and stole part of the demonic godspell. That’s how I learned to manipulate dreams.”
“There are no more demons on this continent, then?” Nicodemus raised his eyebrows. “So to stop the Disjunction, all we need do is kill you?”
“Not quite, boy.” Fellwroth produced a toothy smile. “Typhon and I established hidden cults in every human kingdom, each of which will continue trying to breed a true Imperial. If you want to prevent the War of Disjunction, you will need me. I can help you destroy the cults or rule them. You can choose to do either, but to have any hope of discovering them you must protect me from the wizards and from that vile woman.” Fellwroth nodded to something behind Nicodemus. “I won’t have a betrayer near me.”
Deirdre approached. Her green eyes shone with a wild energy. She had recovered her goddess, her pure love. “How could I have betrayed you, monster?” she asked. “When from the beginning I sought nothing but your death?”
Something occurred to Nicodemus. “Fellwroth, how did you find Boann’s ark? Why bring it here?”
The creature laughed and looked at Deirdre. “You mean she doesn’t know? Her hussy of a goddess never told her?”