Spellbound (31 page)

Read Spellbound Online

Authors: Blake Charlton

BOOK: Spellbound
11.92Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Vivian was adjusting her long white hair. “Whatever the case, we must get back into that library and—”
“Everyone get back!” Cyrus cried as he jumped away from the window. Automatically, Lotannu and Vivian obeyed, but Francesca only frowned at the man until he grabbed her arm and yanked her farther into the room.
“What?” she whispered.
“Three lofting kites circling above the building. They're in formation. They'd only be doing that if they were about to strike.”
“Ghost, get back into the book,” Vivian ordered. “The rest of you protect yourselves. Lotannu and I can handle any attack.”
Shannon's ghost wasted no time jumping into the journal that lay open on the floor. Cyrus pulled Francesca toward the door that led to the hallway. She started to protest but then stopped. She'd heard something strange. “Quiet!” she barked. If only because of her sharp tone, everyone obeyed.
In the silence she could hear it more clearly, the distant priest singing; his devotional song had become unintelligible gibberish.
“Aphasia,” Francesca whispered. “We have to go now!”
“No, we stay,” Vivian calmly said while picking up the journal. “You are referring to Typhon's half dragon?”
Francesca shook her head. “You don't understand what a dragon can be! That creature would destroy your capacity for language.”
Vivian only smiled. “Lotannu, please construct whatever texts you need to see quaternary thoughts.”
“Vivian, I can't seem to … It's just that … only …” Lotannu answered while staring at his hands. “There's a word that means … means …”
Francesca grabbed Cyrus with one hand and opened the door with the other. “Run!” she commanded while pulling him into the hallway. Lotannu yelled something; she didn't care what.
The hallway was a narrow space, sandstone walls leaning close on either side. Beside her Cyrus tried to speak but produced only meaningless sounds.
“God-of-gods, save us!” Francesca swore. The floor shook and orange flecks swam through Francesca's vision. She ran down the hall, trying each door they passed. All were locked.
Suddenly, Cyrus grunted. She looked back to see him kick open one door. Peering inside the room, Francesca saw a plain carpet and sleeping pallet, white walls, and a wide rectangular window. The ground shook again.
Francesca ran though the room and climbed into the window. Her vision was clearing, so she saw with perfect clarity a swirling white cloth and flashing steel talons. “Creator!”
The warkite was flying not twenty feet from the window, moving back and forth like a serpent about to strike.
Francesca tried to back out of the window, but Cyrus's hands stopped her. “Kite!” she blurted.
“It's not … closer for … a reason,” he said with effort and then pointed down. Six feet or so below them hung a roof to the stables. “Jump.”
“It's too steep. I won't be able to—”
Cyrus pushed her out the window.
Screaming, she fell the six feet to land awkwardly on her feet and then onto her side. As she had feared, she began to slide down the redwood shingles. A crash sounded behind her. A hand grabbed her arm, and her robes stiffened. She screamed louder as she and Cyrus slid over the roof's edge.
Then they were in the open air, the muddy alleyway rushing up toward them. All around her blasted a violent torrent of wind. Then she was falling upward. Above her spread the green expanse of a billowing jumpchute.
Her black robes had woven themselves into Cyrus's green ones. A radial web of suspension lines rose up to the chute. One side of the chute went limp, and they lurched toward the inn.
Swearing, Cyrus worked his hands along the lines. An instant later the chute reshaped itself to pull them away from the tavern. “The text misspells near the Walker,” Cyrus yelled. “That's why the warkite is staying back. When we enfold the construct, keep away from its talons.”
“When we do what?”
Just then the warkite struck their chute. Cyrus cast some spell, and the suspension lines began to coil around themselves. Above them the warkite's talons cut through the canopy with loud ripping. The coiling suspension lines pulled Cyrus and Francesca up toward the construct.
Francesca had just enough time to scream again before they struck the chaos of cloth and steel. She tried to cover her face, but her sleeves had become stiff while the cloth around her legs flowed like silk.
The world seemed made of sailcloth until a part in the folds revealed the ground. They were again falling toward the stable roof. Something hard and sharp pressed against Francesca's thigh. Cyrus shouted and the brutal cloth vanished. They were dangling in midair. A green canopy now containing strips of white cloth billowed above them.
Cyrus hung beside her, his left shoulder dark with blood, both his hands working fast on the suspension lines.
Within moments they had flown high enough to see across the wide city. They were heading northeast, with the wind and out toward the Palm District
“The enfoldment cut much of my text,” Cyrus yelled. “We're going to have to race them to Spillwind's Hope.”
Francesca remembered Spillwind's Hope was the ridge lift, but otherwise his words made no sense. “Race whom?”
“The wing behind us.”
Francesca turned and saw three kites, two yellow and one black, rising up from the city and heading straight for them. Then she saw the snaking motion of two white warkites. The streamerlike constructs were rising with shocking speed. “Cyrus, can we outfly a warkite?”
He glanced back. “Hell! We might have to make a crash landing in one of the …” His voice died as it became apparent one of the warkites was going to reach them in only a few moments. With a flurry of movement, Cyrus worked on the suspension lines.
The jumpchute changed shape and stooped into a dive. Below them stretched the maze of sandstone buildings that made up the Palm District. The thick perimeter wall was less than a mile away. Green savanna lay beyond.
Cyrus looked back. When Francesca also did, she sucked in a sharp breath. The warkite flew only tens of feet away. They banked hard right and then rose into a climb.
The warkite shot past Francesca and snaked up to the canopy. Cyrus again coiled the suspension lines, and again Francesca found herself flying up
into a canopy that was being attacked by a warkite. This time she curled into a ball before they struck. Again she was battered by the folds of cloth. Again they began to fall. But this time, Cyrus did not call out. She felt a flash of fear and then a strange sense of detachment. They had been falling too long and were going to smash against some tiled courtyard any moment now.
At last the cloth left her and a reformed canopy spread above them, pulling hard up. They were only twenty feet or so above a watchtower on the perimeter wall. Francesca could make out several men in chain mail staring up at them.
Their rig was rising again. “Are we going to make it?” she yelled, looking over at Cyrus.
His turban and veil had been torn free, and his black curls fluttered in the wind. Before he could respond, another warkite struck the canopy and set the world spinning.
Cyrus moved his hands, and the suspension ropes twisted, but this time they shortened only slowly. Cyrus wasn't going to reach the warkite before the construct tore the canopy into fluttering rags.
Francesca looked down and saw to her horror that they had drifted over the wall and were now falling toward the savanna. As the chute spun, her view swung around so that she looked out over the grass sea. Maybe half a mile away and moving fast were two dozen waves of grass. Running lycanthropes made such waves. The beasts were headed straight for where she and Cyrus were about to crash.
Just before they struck the grass, Cyrus did something that made the ruined canopy exert the last of its wind. Their descent slowed, and the grass stalk that stabbed Francesca in the hip sent mere pain—rather than its stiff shaft—lancing through her abdomen.
Then Cyrus and Francesca fell the last five or so feet among the stalks to hit the moist ground. Impact knocked the wits out of Francesca. For a moment she lay, looking up at the slivers of blue sky amid the waving grass.
Cyrus was standing above her, yelling something about lycanthropes. Then she was on her feet, grasping his hand and trying to follow him as he struggled against the grass. “We have to get back to the wall before they come!” he called.
But the grass was pressing hard against Francesca, and she could not find stable footing.
She fell.
Cyrus was above her again, pulling her back onto her feet. But in doing so, he fell.
Something massive moved through the grass near them. Cyrus somehow stood. A guttural, inhuman voice called out.
“Cyrus!” Francesca yelled as he tried to pull her forward. Her ankle turned and she fell again.
“Cyrus!” she called out, but then something exploded through the grass. The air was filled with splintered stalks and clods of dirt.
Then the sky shone above her, first painfully bright, then completely black.
Vivian's palms went cold as she listened to Lotannu try to speak. “Can't … the words.”
She moved toward his voice. “Come here. I can't get these texts off my eyes fast enough. Let me look through yours.”
Vivian soon encountered Lotannu's hand. After initiating the textual protocol, she was looking through his sharp eyes. For the first time, she saw the private dining room—an ornate white-and-black rug, a nest of embroidered pillows.
Lotannu tried to speak again but produced only a slew of syllables. He squeezed her hand. She squeezed it back. “It's all right, my friend. I've trained all my life for this.”
Francesca and Cyrus must have fled. Likely they would be caught by the half dragon. Or perhaps they would escape. Either way, once Vivian dealt with the wyrm, they would return more interested in joining her cause.
The floor shook. A moment later, chaotic wailing sounded, followed by footsteps. Someone cried out. Francesca had mentioned that the Savanna Walker attacked with his devotees. Vivian supposed that a few of these were now at hand.
Sure enough, the door burst open to reveal two men in ragged Spirish longvests. Each held two short swords in the dual-wielding Spirish style. Vivian was as gentle as possible, casting a net of Numinous around each man's head. They fell unconscious to the floor.
But to Vivian's surprise the prose she had cast began to decay, an effect of the half dragon. Soon the spells would deconstruct, and the men would awaken.
Vivian frowned. She had thought her prose was cogent enough to resist the half dragon. She refreshed the stunning spell and added Magnus bindings to the devotees' hands and feet.
Another yelling devotee appeared in the doorway, this one with a spear. She hit him with both restricting and stunning spells, and he went down.
The floor shook harder now. It wouldn't be long. Lotannu relaxed his
grip on her hand and looked at her. For the first time in what felt like ages, Vivian saw herself. It was disorienting. Her snowy hair and all-white eyes made her seem impossibly old.
The ground shook hard enough to make Lotannu stagger. He looked at the doorway. What Vivian saw shocked her so much that she accidentally jerked her hand away from Lotannu's and was dropped back into her all-but-textual blindness. Lotannu gasped. She grabbed his hand and again saw the seething, amorphous mass of gray skin and limbs. Among these was a human face with bright green eyes that looked exactly like her dead mother's eyes.
Suddenly Vivian felt a surreal certainty that these eyes did not merely look like her mother's eyes; they were her mother's eyes. Her heart began to flutter; the half dragon was a creature beyond anything she had yet imagined. It took every bit of her self-discipline to force down the growing panic. Lotannu started to look away, but she gripped his hand. “Look straight at him.”
“ … can't … blind …” Lotannu answered between meaningless syllables. “Dizzy.”
“I can see him,” she answered. “Look straight at him.”
The half dragon was staring at them with her mother's green eyes. With every ounce of her strength, Vivian forged powerful Numinous and Magnus paragraphs. In a heartbeat, she wove the two languages into a hybrid wartext, a tirade of razor-sharp language.
With a quick backhand throw, she cast the spell at the beast. It shot forward like a lightning bolt of incandescent silver and gold. In a gray blur of speed, the beast withdrew into the hallway like some sea creature retracting into its shell.
The light dimmed. Vivian turned her head toward the window but with her blind eyes saw no text. “Lotannu, the window.” He turned and her breath caught.
Bulging arachnoid appendages of gray flesh crisscrossed the window like a nightmare. Vivian's head swam with confusion. How had the half dragon gotten outside a third-story window so quickly?
She cast a second blast at the many-jointed limbs. Her lightning-like sentences cut through several appendages, leaving them squirming on the floor. But then Lotannu looked back at the doorway and saw the phantasmagoria of gray skin and limbs oozing back into the room.
A whirl of vertigo wrapped around Vivian as she realized that the half dragon wasn't moving between the window and the door; it was in both places. The creature's size was staggering; it enveloped half the building.
She cast another spell at the flesh sliding into the doorway. But when
her text struck it, the sentences misspelled and fell to pieces. The monster's face amid the gray limbs was chanting something, but Vivian couldn't hear what. Then, with growing terror, she realized that she couldn't hear anything at all.
She'd gone deaf.
Vivian had made a grave error—this creature negated her power in a way she had not thought possible. In her pride, she had outmatched herself.
The room darkened as the limbs with impossibly many joints filled the windows. Vivian tried to scream, but part of the beast shot from the door. She barely had time to turn away before the gray flesh knocked her to the floor.
She lost hold of Lotannu's hand and was blind again. Some unbearable force pushed her down. Pain and terror exploded through her mind. She had the sensation that something was about to be torn out of her.
But then the force stopped moving. Everything became still. Suddenly the weight vanished and she was gasping. Tears streamed down her face.
A hand found hers, and she was looking through Lotannu's eyes at herself bawling like a child. The room was full of light. A breeze whispered at the window. She and Lotannu struggled to their feet.
“I'm sorry,” she blurted between sobs. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I was wrong. I didn't know what it was.”
Lotannu shook his head. “The … thing …” he said. “It left … not … made it do that …”
But it didn't matter what had compelled the creature to spare them. All that mattered was that they were still breathing.
Lotannu picked up the book that held Shannon's ghost, and they ran down the stairs of the inn. They stepped over men who had been crushed to death and hurried out into a street filled with hot afternoon sunshine.
 
DEIRDRE CONVULSED BACK into life in the still green water. She had never drowned herself before; with the restrictions Typhon had placed on her mind, she never would have been able to stay underwater long enough to die. It was only the partial paralysis that allowed her to do so this time.
Reflexively she tried to inhale and discovered her chest was full of water. The reflecting pool was only four feet deep, so she stood and began coughing water out of her lungs.
Sunlight poured down out of the blue sky, but Deirdre shivered as she waded to the pool's edge and climbed onto the garden's path.
Somewhere in the city, the Savanna Walker would be compelled to turn away from whatever he was doing and come to repossess her for Typhon.
The demon must have sent the Savanna Walker to kill the Astrophell wizards. He had not wanted her to interfere and so gave the Walker the power to paralyze her. Deirdre couldn't have cared less about the Astrophell spies; she had drowned herself to stop the Walker from hunting down Francesca after he dealt with the wizards.
But now Deirdre had played her last move. After this suicide, Typhon would search all her memories and discover how she had liberated Francesca and Shannon's ghost.
A breeze picked up and chilled her skin even further.
Deirdre turned and looked back at the reflecting pool. On its glassy surface she could see a mirror image of the sanctuary's dome, the tall slender palm trees, the limpid Spirish sky. So strange that this is where she should find an end. She thought of her native highlands, the long verdant glens, the constant gray skies, flowers in spring, winter mountains dusted with snow.
Now, between her revival and repossession, she was free. For a brief period, she was again mortal. She could die, and Typhon could not retrieve her.
She thought again of her lost sons and her unknown grandchildren. She thought of Nicodemus and Shannon and Francesca, all of them striving with quests and grand ideas. Deirdre had never been like them; she had only loved her goddess, her one true love. Her Boann.
She remembered her deity, the way Boann would touch her cheek, how childish the river goddess could be, how some nights the young goddess had taken her out in the highlands, how they had slept beside fern-lined waterfalls, how the young goddess had nearly curled up in her arms.
Deirdre was shivering. Her last moments in the sun and she was shivering. The wind picked up, and she could hear it rushing through a nearby palm.
Boann was a river goddess. Her home was among the secluded creeks and falls, so far away now. In this savanna city there were only reservoirs and pools.
Deirdre had to protect Boann, had to keep the memories of Francesca and Shannon's ghost away from Typhon. She stepped back into the pool. No time to delay, no time to admire this world. The Walker would come soon. She lowered herself. The wind calmed. It was silent again.
Deirdre took one last look at the world of burnished light and blue sky. Then she sank into the dark green water, the last thing she would know.
 
NICODEMUS WOKE TO screaming.
He was lying under a wool blanket, staring at the slanted cabin ceiling. It took a moment to remember he was in the redwood camp with his students.
The screaming came again, high and ragged. He rushed for the door. Jasp, who had been sleeping on a nearby cot, was struggling to his feet.
Outside, Nicodemus looked around his camp: seven cabins beneath the forest's tallest trees. Here the shade was so complete that, even at midday, Chthonic spells could briefly function. The ground under Nicodemus's toes was wet from rain and ruddy from centuries of decaying redwood bark. The air had a sweet, fermented scent.
Nicodemus scanned the surroundings but discovered only trunks, branches, and a few bushes. Using his ability to see Language Prime, he could make out a pine martin scrambling through the nearby branches. Through the cabin walls, he could see his students rousing from sleep. But nowhere did he see the massive, sleek shapes of the lycanthropes. Nor did he see any of the Walker's many forms.
He saw no threat at all.
Then she stumbled in front of him and fell onto her side. The long frothing currents of her hair were splayed into a ragged white corona. Her face was twisted into a sharp, inhuman mask of pain. As he watched, her eyes melted and trickled down her face. Her dark green robes had broken into seaweed strips. Her body, once an idealization of youth, was now slack. The skin on her ribs sagged to reveal the rows of bones. Her breasts hung flat against her concave belly.
Shocked, Nicodemus could only stare—unable to look away. Finally he whispered, “Boann?”
The goddess snapped back into the beautiful youth she had been and ran to Nicodemus. Wailing, she looked up into his face like a child who had hurt herself so badly that she could not stop the tears or the instinctive panic that follows a first intimation of mortality. It was an expression so earnest, so human that Nicodemus forgot she was a deity and opened his arms as if she were a child.
She ran to him, and he tried to gather her up into an embrace. But her waist became viscous. Nightmarelike, she oozed out of his arms and fell to the ground in two pieces. Her hair dissolved. Her eyes melted out of her sockets. “Dead!” her mouth moaned. “She's dead for all time!” Then she jammed her fingers into the soil. Her shoulders broke apart. Her head wrinkled like a winter apple and then melted. Slowly the rest of her seeped into the dirt.
“Fiery heaven!” Nicodemus whispered in shock and stepped back. “Creator save us!”
The goddess was gone.
“It's Deirdre,” someone said.
Nicodemus looked up and saw Magister Shannon. He and all the kobolds
had emerged from their cabins. Suddenly Nicodemus understood. “Deirdre has died?”
Shannon put his hand up to touch Azure on his shoulder. “Nothing else would have done this to Boann.”
Nicodemus looked at the ground. “Is she … is Boann dead as well then?”
Shannon walked to Nicodemus. “Her ark seemed unchanged.” He gestured to the unremarkable rock sitting in the middle of the camp. “But I don't know.”
Nicodemus looked at his teacher's gaunt face. The contours of his skull had become prominent around the temples. “Deirdre's dead,” Nicodemus heard himself say. He was suddenly, absurdly terrified that Shannon was going to die. It was a hard and strange pain, almost like nausea. Shannon might not die in a day or even a year. But his mentor was going to die far too soon, and far too soon Nicodemus would join him.
Then something in Nicodemus seemed to fracture or split. He felt first embarrassed and then almost numb. He ordered Dross, Slag, and Flint to search around the camp and then sent Jasp up a nearby promontory where he could look out onto the reservoir and the city beyond. Vein he ordered back to bed.

Other books

Noose by Bill James
When Hope Blossoms by Kim Vogel Sawyer
Stepbrother Virgin by Annie George
Rescued in Paradise by Nicole Christianson
El evangelio del mal by Patrick Graham
NovaForge by Toney, Scott
How to Be a Movie Star by William J. Mann
Lord of the Changing Winds by Rachel Neumeier