Spellbound (36 page)

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Authors: Blake Charlton

BOOK: Spellbound
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“Can you remember how Typhon got a hold of you?” Magistra Niyol asked.
He frowned.
“There was an attack on a warehouse where we were hiding. My author and I were still one … but some kind of warkite surprised us. I remember seeing myself bleeding on the ground and thinking I'd died.”
Magistra Niyol nodded as she read this. “Then what?”
“They took me into the sanctuary, to rooms near the top of the dome. I was fighting as hard as I could, so I couldn't see things clearly. Deirdre was there. And a pale demon, Typhon I suppose. But there was a woman … or what I thought was a woman.”
“She wasn't a woman?” Magistra Niyol asked.
“Give me a moment,”
he wrote while wracking his memory.
“I think she was a ghost. She did something to my mind. I think it was she who took out my memories. That would make sense. Deirdre wouldn't have known what was happening to me. She wouldn't have been able to see me or this other woman. Perhaps the demon told her, but she simply thought it was part of Shannon's murder. That would explain why she left the note for me to find my murderer. Especially given the fact that I didn't recognize that ghost at the time, but I think she was the ghost of someone I've since seen.”
Magistra Niyol narrowed her white eyes at Shannon after reading this. “Typhon took you to the ghost of someone who's still alive?”
The ghost nodded.
“This might sound mad, but now I'm certain about whose ghost removed my memories.”
He paused before writing,
“It was Francesca's.”
 
LATE AT NIGHT, Francesca woke when Cyrus got out of bed. She heard his feet clap on the floorboards, the door open. He was going to pee. Her own bladder felt distended. When Cyrus came back, she got up and was surprised to see a kobold in the other bed. Dross maybe? Except for Vein, she couldn't identify any of the kobolds.
Outside the sky was lightening with dawn. The air was cold, so after squatting behind a nearby fern, she hurried back into the cabin. Inside, it remained dark. The kobolds would have built it to be so.
Once by their bed, Cyrus lifted the blankets for her to climb back into their warmth. As she did so, she saw his head against the sheets: his black curls on white cloth, his mouth covered by a veil. Though her mind was still slow with sleep, she had a sudden lucid awareness of her progress through life, not yet old but well away from youth. She'd lived half a spellwright's life already. It had seemed to go by so fast, and yet there was so much more she wanted to do.
Settling into bed next to an old lover, his lungs drawing even breath, his heart softly kicking, Francesca felt as if life was a spinning firework of night and day too soon exhausted. She wondered what it would be like when the whirling exchange of sun and stars ended for her. She wondered if death would seem strange, or if it would be a return to what she had known before birth.
Pulling the covers more tightly around her shoulders, she felt a dreamlike conviction that death would be a state she had already experienced.
 
SHANNON'S GHOST WAS the first into Typhon's private study. Like the rest of the quarters atop the dome, it was deserted. Magistra Niyol was certain the demon had fled. Her ancient face had tightened when she announced that the hunt for the demon would have to start over when he resurfaced in another city.
Typhon had left in haste. Chairs lay overturned. Books and scrolls lay strewn across a table and floor. Magister Akoma stood frowning over the loose manuscripts. “It's some kind of research,” he mumbled while moving a few sheets around. “Not like anything I've seen.”
Meanwhile, Magistra Niyol and the ghost searched the shelved books. After only a moment, Vivian pulled a book from the shelves. “This one,” she said and undid the clasp. The ghost walked over to her. Magister Akoma didn't look up from the pages spread before him.
Vivian leafed through the book and then, with fingers surprisingly dexterous for their age, plucked free a page of golden prose and tossed it into the air. A stream of text followed in a glowing eruption. The pages of the book flipped until they reached the back cover.
The resulting golden cloud condensed into the transparent figure of a tall woman with freckled skin and a braid of dark hair streaked with white. She was without doubt Francesca's ghost … only she seemed twice as old as the living Francesca.
Magistra Niyol cleared her throat. “Francesca?”
The female ghost turned, a confused look on her face. Then she closed her eyes and lowered her head as if falling asleep.
“Francesca?” the living woman repeated.
The female ghost's eyes snapped open and she looked around.
This somnolent state must have been what Shannon's ghost had been in when Deirdre had freed him from a book.
“Ask her to write a note to herself,”
Shannon wrote.
Magistra Niyol frowned at the request but then asked Francesca's ghost to write in Numinous the date of her author's birth. The ghost obeyed. Magistra Niyol stepped closer and plucked the golden sentence from the ghost's hands. “She thinks her author was born more than three hundred years ago.”
Shannon's ghost frowned.
“Ask her to write down when her author died.”
Magistra Niyol did, and when she took the sentence from Francesca's ghost, she shook her head. “The ghost thinks her author has been dead for a hundred years.”
“I don't understand,”
Shannon replied.
“Nor do I.”
“How long will it take before she becomes lucid enough to correspond with us?”
Magistra Niyol seemed to consider the question. “I can't say. But we shouldn't dally. Even if Typhon has fled, the many rebellious hierophants could make things bloody.” She looked at the ghost. “Let's put both you and her in this journal. We can pull you out in a safer location.”
“Where would we go?”
“Tonight, we'll have to find a room in a tavern. Then we find a caravan out to Coldlock Harbor so I can cast a colaboris spell to Lurrikara.”
“But what of my author? And Nicodemus and Francesca?”
Vivian nodded. “After the colaboris is off, we can focus on finding Nicodemus.”
“He's not the anti-Halcyon.”
“I will make my own judgment about that when we find him. And when I do, no doubt he won't be far from your author.”
The ghost rubbed his chin and then nodded.
“Vivian,” Magister Akoma said.
Ghostly Shannon turned to see the man still standing over the table covered with open books and research.
“I think it's a metaspell,” he said. “Something that can change the nature of language within a large area. It seems to take some linguistic aspect of the caster and imbue that area with the rules inherent to that aspect.”
Magistra Niyol let out a long breath. “My friend, could you say that in a way that makes sense?”
He looked at her. “If a demon cast this spell, it would make all languages in the area more demonic, which I think would mean that language would become more chaotic … maybe more intuitive as well. I'm guessing it's meant to help the demonic legions gain a foothold on this continent.”
“We should destroy it,”
Shannon cast to both of the wizards.
Magister Akoma shook his head. “But consider what would happen if the Halcyon cast this spell: she could make all languages more logical. She could make the nature of language itself antidemonic.”
Vivian paused and then said, “Gather up all the manuscripts. When there's time tonight, make a copy of your findings in here.” She held up Francesca's clinical journal.
“One thing more,” Magister Akoma said softly. “The Halcyon could cast this spell, but so could the Storm Petrel.”
Magistra Niyol went stiff. “Then we had better put it someplace safe and try to discover who Nicodemus truly is.” She glanced at the ghost. “While we're at it, let's find out what kind of creature is walking around in a living body calling herself Francesca.”
 
FRANCESCA WOKE AGAIN when her bed rocked. She looked up and saw Cyrus stumbling onto his feet. He didn't say anything, so she turned away and closed her eyes. A hand grabbed her hip.
“What?” she groaned as she rolled over. Or rather, tried to groan. For some reason, her voice didn't seem to work. She swallowed. Cyrus was swaying above her, his lips were moving but his voice was also gone. She sat up and tried to say “Cyrus?” but heard nothing. The light slipping through the few chinks in the boards began to fade. The cabin grew darker.
Cyrus was moving more frantically now. “Cyrus, what's happened?” This time she could feel voice vibrating in her throat, but she couldn't hear that voice. In fact, she could not hear anything. She had gone deaf. She tried to run for the door, but the light had disappeared. It was then she knew the cabin wasn't growing darker; she was going blind.
Francesca burst from the cabin into sunlight and chaos. Uprooted redwoods lay all around. One had crushed a cabin. A kobold head and severed torso protruded from the wreckage. Something massive had torn deep gashes into the dirt. All through this scene twisted tendrils of blindness.
Francesca yelled to Cyrus but could not hear her own voice. For a moment she went completely blind. Panic coursed through her, and then she was running. Vision returned with a giant, toppled redwood trunk. She jumped onto the giant tree. The bark jabbed into her chest and stomach, but she ignored the pain and climbed over the tree and fell into a bank of ferns.
In the shade her vision improved, but she still could not hear. She tried to run farther into the forest, but suddenly the ferns around her burned with direct sunlight. She turned to watch a redwood come crashing down to soundlessly slap the forest floor. The gigantic tree slowly wobbled as it rebounded.
She looked toward the tree's roots and saw a ball of blindness. The nothing grew larger in her vision, as if it were moving toward her.
She turned to run but veins of blindness twisted around her. Dark figures, kobolds maybe, sprinted past. Something struck her back, and the visible world vanished. She sensed acceleration. Agony flying up one arm. Then all pain, all touch, all orientation in space vanished.
She had died.
She was dead.
She was pretty sure she was dead.
What else could this be?
She searched for something to move, for her body. Nothing. She tried again. Still nothing. This was death?
A quarter hour passed.
Maybe.
A day passed.
Maybe.
Perhaps no time had passed. Was death a mind isolated in void? She
had always assumed death would be either as the priests claimed or be nothing at all. But the priests seemed to have it all wrong. There was no spirit hurtling through the universe to an eternity-deciding judgment by the Creator. Then again, she had not returned to the nothingness she had been before birth.
She was still herself.
And she was still capable of irritation. If this was the afterlife, then it was bloody pathetic. To have thought but not perception, it was God-of-gods damned anticlimactic. It was evidence of a poorly constructed moral underpinning of the universe.
She wondered if, sometime during eternity, she'd get to speak to the God-of-gods. If so, she had some bloody choice things to say. A soul should be judged, transformed, or evaporated. It should not, under any blasted circumstances, be suspended in nothingness the way a cucumber might be suspended in brine to make a pickle. That smacked of a Creator who had gotten halfway through imbuing moral value into the universe and then said, “Screw it, let's get a drink.”
The list of snide, enraged, and blasphemous things she'd like to scream at the God-of-gods flared through her isolated mind.
But then …
The blurry image of a redwood canopy flashed before her. A pale sky high above. Slowly her eyes focused on individual branches. Something moved above her. A massive creature. She could see the backs of its legs, its buttocks, its skin a deep gray, in places glassy, in others covered with mollusklike parasites that dug their shells into its skin and extended feathery organs into the air where they fluttered in the wind.
The creature took a step backward, and the ground shook. Then her hands tingled and she felt an invisible wall slam down on her. It took a moment to realize that it must have been the shockwave from an explosion.
The nightmare creature vanished.
Shakily, she stood and looked around the empty forest. A kobold was by her side. It wasn't Vein. One of the others. He took her arm and led her away. When she fell, he carried her in his arms as easily as if she were a child.
The kobold ran into the forest, eventually reaching a tight ring of trees with a pit in their center. Francesca had heard of such “fairy rings,” created by young saplings that grew up from the roots of an ancient, dying tree. Magister Shannon, Azure, Vein, two other kobolds, and Cyrus were crouched at one end.
Cyrus ran to her and took her in his arms. She embraced him and discovered that tears were streaming down her face. Cyrus was speaking to
her. But she couldn't hear. “I can't hear,” she said. He winced as if she had just yelled. Maybe she had yelled. She couldn't tell how loud her voice was. “I've gone deaf,” she said.
Cyrus seemed to talk to Shannon. An arc of golden prose was flowing between the old wizard's brow and that of Azure. The familiar was studying Francesca.
Cyrus's arms were still around her, but her legs were shaking. “I'm going to sit,” she announced and sank to the ground. The forest floor felt cool on her backside.
Her breathing was becoming ragged, so she closed her eyes and dug her fingers into the soil, soft and dark. Moments ago she had thought she was dead, and her first reaction had been to critique the Creator. Now that her mind was again possessed by a body, she felt panicked that she might yet die.
The world was ineffably beautiful—dirt in her fingernails, the fragrance of rot and growth. Cyrus's hands were on her shoulders. She looked into his face. His eyes were opened as if they couldn't open wide enough. She looked at his sharp black beard, his light brown skin.
He was beautiful. It made her cry harder.
The world was beautiful and she had almost left it. Her chest began to shake. She felt like a child. One type of shock seemed to be wearing off and another was setting in. She closed her eyes again, and Cyrus's arms closed around her. Thoughts of death made her weep. After a time, he began to rock her. She let herself be rocked until her chest stopped shaking. She wiped mucus from her nose and felt the strange peace that only a half hour of abject sobbing can bestow.
She opened her eyes and again saw Cyrus's face. With his rough thumbs, he wiped the tears on her cheeks. She took his hand. It was so warm, so real. He kissed her cheek. She wrapped her arms around him and held on.
She noticed Nicodemus sitting on a massive root, his hair splayed out across his shoulders. Sweat glistened across his chest and stomach. His olive-brown skin was covered with red welts. He must have been pulling tattooed Chthonic spells from his skin.
A two-inch laceration on his chest was weeping blood. His neck and beardless face were splattered with something that looked like black paint. Her clerical mind analyzed and categorized him as “minor wounds, nonemergency.” Three kobolds were crouched at Nicodemus's feet while Shannon stood to one side. Everyone was talking.
“Cyrus, what happened?” she asked in what she hoped was a soft voice. She looked at him. His lips were moving. “I can't hear you,” she whispered. “I'm deaf.”
Cyrus turned toward Nicodemus. Suddenly everyone was looking at
her. Shannon walked over and held out a golden sentence. She took it and translated it into:
“Are you hurt?”
“No,” she said.
He handed her a paragraph.
“The Savanna Walker got a hold of you. Nicodemus saw something flash between you two before he could reach you. We're worried that the beast did something.”
“I'm fine,” she said. “Except for this temporary deafness.”
Shannon grimaced.
“What?”
He paused and then held out another sentence:
“We're not sure it's temporary.”
She sat up straighter. “Why?”
“Everyone but Nicodemus went deaf when the Walker neared, but we've already regained hearing. Can you tell me if anything else might be wrong?”
“Nothing's wrong,”
she wrote back and then struggled to her feet. “Nothing's wrong,” she said aloud.
Now Nicodemus was standing before her, something like sympathy or pity on his face.
Irritation flashed through her. “I said I'm fine.”
Nicodemus and Cyrus winced. She must have spoken too loudly.
Cyrus was standing beside her now. They were closing in on her, looking at her as they might a wounded dog. “Just …” she tried to say more calmly, “leave me alone.”
Cyrus and Shannon only stepped closer. They were talking to each other. But Nicodemus's eyes went to hers. He seemed to be searching for something. She begged him with her eyes. He understood and turned away. First Shannon and then Cyrus looked at him. They seemed to be arguing. Shannon turned away from her and went to Nicodemus. But Cyrus touched her cheek. He was speaking rapidly. “I can't hear you,” she repeated with irritation and was surprised when her eyes started to tear.
He looked at her quizzically. Cyrus had learned only the hierophantic magical language; therefore, lacking fluency in the wizardly languages and the common magical languages, he could not communicate with her textually. He seemed to be talking aloud again. He tried to take her hand, but she pulled away. “Damn it, I can't hear you!” she snapped and went to the opposite side of the fairy ring. Blessedly, he didn't follow.
Safely away from their pitying stares, Francesca prayed that she had never made a patient feel the way the men had just made her feel. For a moment, her mind filled with graphic ways to tell these men, or all men in general, that they lacked the sense the God-of-gods had given to a large pot of heated glue.
But then the tears came faster and her hands began to tremble. She focused on keeping quiet her ragged breaths and sudden, involuntary inhalations. It frightened and shamed her that she could not tell if the men could hear her. Gradually her breathing slowed, and she focused on her hearing … or lack of it.
She strained, trying to detect even a whisper. Nothing. Not silence, nothing. She snapped her fingers next to her ears. Again nothing. She thumped her fingers against the bony protuberance behind each ear. She could feel each finger strike but could not hear the vibrations moving through her skull.
She took a deep breath and tried to remember the last thing she had heard. It must have been the previous night. Or perhaps when she had woken up to pee. But she couldn't remember having heard any sound then. She had spoken to Cyrus before falling asleep, so she had heard his voice. But no matter how hard she tried, she could not remember the sound of his voice. She could recall every word she had said, but she could not remember the sounds of those words. When she recalled them, she recalled an image of the written words.
Her hands began to tremble more violently, and she realized that she could not remember the sound attached to any word. She knew her name was Francesca, but not what Francesca sounded like. “Cyrus,” she tried to say. “Nicodemus.”
The two men almost ran to her. Shannon followed more slowly.
“I can't remember sound,” she tried to say and realized as she did that she remembered the movements of the mouth, tongue, lips, larynx that produced a word, but not the tone, pitch, or timbre those movements would produce.
As Shannon moved to stand by Cyrus, he cast a golden sentence. She translated it into,
“What does that mean?”
She cleared her throat and spoke. “It means that whatever the Savanna Walker did involves more than my ears. Or perhaps doesn't involve my ears at all. He has altered the part of my mind that perceives and processes sound.”
The men were looking at her and one another in confusion.
“It's the only explanation why I can't remember or imagine any sound that—”
Shannon interrupted her by casting another sentence.
“I am sorry, Magistra, but we cannot understand you.”
She frowned at the message until she understood: unable to regulate her voice, she must have produced a mash of sound. She folded into a ball and began to rock. Cyrus's arms surrounded her. They stayed like that for a long time. When she looked up, she saw Nicodemus crouched a safe distance
away. She had again reached the calmness that comes after weeping, and from this calmness she recognized Nicodemus's sympathetic expression. She was now disabled like he was.
She wrote an explanation as to how she knew that her mind's ability to perceive, recall, and imagine sound had been extinguished. She cast the resulting spell to Nicodemus. But the man jumped away from her spell. An instant later, a thin silvery sentence wrapped around her paragraph and yanked it to Shannon's waiting hand. The old wizard seemed to read the passage aloud.
The other two men looked at her—Cyrus's expression full of pity, Nicodemus's pained as if the agony of his own disability had worsened. The men talked for a while. Then Shannon wrote a response and cast it to her.
“We think the Savanna Walker might have taken a portion of your mind the way Typhon took Nicodemus's ability to spell. We might get it back once we chase after the beast.”
“Chase after?”
“Nicodemus wounded the Walker. Using the beast's name allowed Nicodemus to escape the Walker's influence; however, Nico could combat it only in the forest shade, and the beast escaped into the sunlight. We are not sure why, but he did not flee back into the city. He ran north into the savanna.”

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