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Authors: Blake Charlton

BOOK: Spellbound
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Nicodemus shrugged.
“Does he talk to you?”
“Insesently! He raerely makes sense. All the words come out in a sing-song mash.”
Francesca lowered her eyebrows.
“When does all this talking happen?”
“We've clashed over the years. The advnatage goes to him in brigther enveronments and in the city where he can make those nearby into devotees. Away from the city and in the dark, I have the advatnage.”
Francesca studied Nicodemus's eyes for a while. They seemed cold again. This was the person he wanted to be—detached, calculating, aggressively focused on one goal.
She looked back toward the savanna. He didn't write anything more. After a while, she began to think about her own desire to become a master physician. Suddenly she found herself asking:
“Could you ever read for enjoyment?”
“I was nevar fast, but I injoyed it, yes. Right up to when I fled Starhaven, I always had a book under my bed.”
“What kind of books?”
He took longer to reply.
“Nothing speciel.”
“You're embarrassed!”
she gleefully wrote.
“I am not.”
“What were they, erotic Ixonian poems?”
“Knightly romances, mostly from Lorn. But a few by Spirish autors.”
“I love knightly romances!”
“What did I tell you about mocking the retarded?”
“No! I read them every chance I get, which isn't often. Whom do you read?”
He stared at her for a moment and then wrote, “
Robert DeRibgy.
”
“I love DeRigby! Though at times he can be a bit overwritten and … clichéd. What do you like about him?”
“That he's a bit overwritten and … clichéd.”
“You're being ironic.”
“I'm trying to be supercelious.”
“You're not going to let that one go, huh?”
Nicodemus was looking at her differently. He held out another sentence.
“Do you read any Isabella Gawan?”
“She's my FAVORITE!”
He seemed to laugh when he read this.
“Even thouh she can get slow and … prechy.”
“Especially when she's slow and … preachy!”
“Are you sure you never met a woman named April in Northern Spires?”
“Your tutor when you were young? You already asked me. No. I'm certain. Why?”
He shook his head.
“Gawan was her favorite as well. It's just odd. And your long hair. But never mind.”
Francesca did not know how to respond to this so she looked down to
the bright savanna. Maybe a quarter hour passed. Then, suddenly, she found herself writing,
“What if we can't recover my hearing?”
Nicodemus studied her for a long time.
“You would adjust.”
“But I wouldn't be able to speak to my patients, or listen to them. I couldn't be a physician.”
Again he studied her for a long time but wrote nothing.
“It's a disability that would destroy me.”
His eyes were sympathetic.
“You don't want me to lie to you and tell you it would be easy.”
“LIKE HELL I DON'T! Tell me we'll end my disability and that life'll be cream and honey and beautiful young men giving me foot massages.”
His veil moved as if he were smiling.
“I'm sure your right.”
“There you go again, lying about how everything's going to be fine.”
He seemed to laugh again but looked at her with a curious intensity.
“Disability might destroy part of you, but some part will remane. There is strenght in what remains.”
Francesca read this and then looked at Nicodemus. There was something beautiful in the strength he had found, something horrible as well. He was, after all, a killer. She looked back down to the grasslands and wondered what she would do to recover her hearing and her memories.
Below them the savanna was beginning to rise. Looking ahead, Francesca saw low stony hills near the horizon. She pointed.
Nicodemus handed her a sentence.
“The Greenwater is within that rang. It won't be long now.”
She didn't reply but watched the hills draw closer. Twice Cyrus came back and he and Nicodemus shouted to each other and pointed. The airship became narrower and then dropped into a dive that made the air rush past more quickly.
Maybe a quarter hour later, they flew over a hill and looked out on a wide valley, at the bottom of which lay the Greenwater—a long, narrow lake that glinted with the late afternoon sunlight. Its bank was surrounded by trees that looked like oaks but possessed trunks nearly twenty meters in diameter. Beyond the oaks stretched a valley floor covered by short grass that was interrupted by stretches of sand.
Suddenly Francesca jumped.
Nicodemus looked at her.
“What do you see?”
She pointed at it and held out the word,
“Nothing!”
Nicodemus tried to sleep as they waited for darkness.
The hierophants had anchored the
Queen's Lance
to a boulder atop a rocky hill and then split the airship. Half of the cloth and all the crew landed on the hill while the other half remained aloft, kitelike. Should the crew be threatened, they could cast a spell up the tether, and the flying half would burn enough text to pull everyone aloft.
The crew, still connected to the ship by silk cords, set up a basic camp. They used the ship's silk to fashion short two-person tents and then served a meal of flatbread, cheese, and water.
When the sun set, Francesca sat beside Nicodemus and handed him a sentence. He translated it quickly but still introduced a few misspellings.
“You'd beter come back or their be won't anyone to rite me agravatengly misspelled messeges.”
He handed her a sentence that read
“a'!Djnr'WeO9WC;EsrioN”
and then,
“was that enuff misspelling to tide you over untill I get back?”
Laughing, she threw his own words back into his face. He pretended she'd just put one of his eyes out. It wasn't terribly funny, but he laughed loudly, nervously. Her laughter was a disconcerting monotone. She couldn't hear herself.
She handed him,
“What if it's a trap? The trap with the second dragon?”
“
Youll save me from it.
”
“
How do I do that?
”
He shrugged.
“Youll think of soemthing.”
She rolled her eyes.
Neither of them wrote for a moment. The horizon was darkening. She made ready to stand and leaned in slightly. He recognized this as the action of someone about to lend a comforting touch—a hand on the shoulder, a pat on his back.
He quickly leaned away.
Hurt registered on her pale face and in her very dark brown eyes.
Hot panic knotted itself up inside his chest as if he'd just broken something valuable.
But then her face relaxed as she remembered what his touch would do to her. She held out a sentence:
“Be careful!”
After he nodded, she walked away. He thought about her as she went: her height, her long brown hair, her very dark eyes.
The evening crept on. When the sun sank behind the horizon, Cyrus appeared beside him. “When will you go?” he asked curtly.
Nicodemus didn't stand. “Soon.”
“We anchor here until midmorning tomorrow. Then Izem must start the run for Dar and Lurrikara.”
Nicodemus nodded. “I will be back before dawn, or I won't be back at all.”
“Bring back her hearing.”
Nicodemus looked up. Fierce brown eyes between veil and turban stared back at him. “I will do all I can.”
“May I come with you?” Cyrus asked.
“You'd just get in the way. He would infect you with aphasia.”
Cyrus said nothing for a while. He moved as if he was going to walk away, but then he stopped and said, “In a way that's hard to explain, I worry for her. I never stopped worrying for her, and I want her to be happy.”
Nicodemus nodded, understanding that the other man had just made the closest thing to a declaration of love as he could. “I can see why,” Nicodemus said.
“Good. Bring back her hearing.” Cyrus met his gaze and then went away.
A quarter hour later, the black sky was bright with stars. They shone with a precision that Nicodemus had only ever known on savanna nights. Though the day had been warm, the temperature was dropping fast.
As Nicodemus set off for the Greenwater, the crescent blackmoon rose over the hills. With his ability to see Language Prime, Nicodemus could make out every fold in the dark land by the faint glow of moss on the rocks or short grass on the soil. Bats—flares of life against the crystalline sky—fluttered about catching insects, which were specks of life so faint that they disappeared when he looked directly at them.
When he topped the last hill and looked out upon the valley of the Greenwater, Nicodemus stopped to check his skinspells. He had covered his every inch with sharp Chthonic language.
As he walked down into the valley, he had no doubt he was walking into a trap; of whose design—the Savanna Walker's or Typhon's—he did not know or particularly care. The demon, or the half-dragon, might have a surprise waiting for him, but he was carrying a surprise to them.
He left the long sheets of stone that covered the hilltops and stepped
onto sandy soil, still warm from the sunlight. Compared with the lush savanna, alive with birds and rodents and large animals, the valley was barren; only the grass and the squat oak trees glowed with Language Prime.
A year ago, a lycanthropic spellwright had told him that the trees were ancient creations of Chimera—hybrids of plants and animals, and as such could create the runes of the lycanthropic magical languages. It was from these trees, deranged by the attack of the ancient Neosolar legion, came the area's feared metaspells.
Nicodemus suspected that the Savanna Walker would be lurking among the trees. But just in case, he began to walk a wide circuit around the Greenwater.
About halfway around, something unseen clamped down hard on his left shoulder. Reflexively, he peeled a short cutting spell from his right hip and punched it into his attacker. Ten thousand razor-wire sentences sprang out to coil around an eight-foot-tall figure that leapt away and fell on its back.
The thing thrashed. The only sound was that of grass and sand shifting. Then the creature began to jerk and twitch as if it were made of stiff metal limbs and springs.
Nicodemus stepped closer and saw that his many lacerating sentences had coiled themselves around a snouted head. He could see in the shape that its maw was open, its lips peeled back in agony.
A lycanthropic ghost.
Nicodemus's cutting spell contracted, and the ghost crumbled. Nicodemus remembered the clamplike sensation on his shoulder and realized that the ghost must have tried to bite him. Contact with his skin had begun to misspell the construct and then allowed his cutting text to crush the ghost.
Nicodemus didn't feel much of anything, except perhaps a touch of solemnity: a textual intelligence that must have been written before the Neosolar legions marched down the peninsula was no more. Hopefully the other ghosts haunting the valley had seen the spell die and would know not to attack him.
A voice called out in the night, low and slowly forming words, and then came a guttural grinding tone. Nicodemus looked up to the row of wide oaks and the water beyond. They were moving between the trunks, some on all fours, some standing on their hind legs. Even in the pale starlight, their large black eyes glinted like mirrors. Twelve of them, he counted.
They fell silent. One among them was larger than the rest. His legs bowed out and he moved awkwardly as if bearing weight. To Nicodemus the creature appeared blurry, as if he were looking at the creature underwater.
The Walker.
The dozen creatures around him were lycanthropes. Or, rather, they had been lycanthropes before he infected them with aphasia and then rotted their minds until they were his devotees. He must have caught them when he ditched the katabeast corpse and then used the carcass as bait.
Cold determination filled Nicodemus. The lycanthropes would be dangerous, but it was a one-moon night; in the resulting darkness, he could wield all his skill in the Chthonic languages. His first instinct was to attack, but there was the issue of Francesca's memories and hearing.
The Walker's singsong ravings carried across the chill night air. Nicodemus folded his arms and waited. The raving got louder “ … misspelled the spook spoke … retardation, end of creation, retardation … Nicoco, such a stupid boy, such a cripple cripple. Crinkle cripple!”
The usual nonsense. There was no point in responding. He waited.
The aphasic lycanthropes joined in the ranting, growling and barking nothing words to accompany the Walker.
“Mmmother to me. The different one. Different one. She's here for you. Moother to me. Crack your creekers, cripple, suck out the slippery marrow.”
This was new: the Walker had never spoken of a mother before. Nicodemus was growing cold and impatient.
“Break your bones, suck out your bloodmakers,” the Walker raved. The lycanthropes moved in slow, twitchy movements around him. “Cracker your creekers. Crack your creatures. Suck it out, hot and slippery.”
A wave of disgust moved through Nicodemus. If the beast had a trap, he should get on with springing it.
“It's retardation, end the creation. Nicocococreaker.”
Nicodemus peeled from his forearm a paragraph of tightly packed Chthonic runes. He held it between his thumb and first two fingers as he might a writing quill. Carefully, he pointed the paragraph at one of the lycanthropes and disengaged its restraining sentence. The compressed paragraph sprang open, launching its functional end forward. Bright as a sunbeam, the sentence shot through the night and, with needlelike phrases, bit into a lycanthrope's hind leg. Perhaps the creature felt a sting akin to an insect bite. But judging by how little the lycanthrope reacted, Nicodemus guessed it hadn't noticed.
He'd never known the Walker or any of his devotees to use one of the Chthonic languages, so Nicodemus was certain that his spells were invisible to his enemies.
Aside from the Walker in the wolf's body, there were eleven lycanthropes. Nicodemus pulled four more condensed paragraphs from his forearm and cast them on the four lycanthropes farthest from the Savanna Walker. Should his targets touch the Walker, his sentences would be disspelled.
But he wasn't worried.
Quickly, he peeled from his lower back five tattooed blasting texts. Each of these he attached to one of his targeting sentences. He chose one and, with a wrist flick, cast it away. The blasting text flew along the targeting sentence for ten feet and then a small after-paragraph detonated with a crack and sent the bulk of the text flying down its sentence to strike its target. With a blossom of molten prose, the text tore the lycanthrope into a hundred pieces no bigger than a bread loaf. A moment later the auditory report echoed through the valley.
The lycanthropes cringed but then looked around, confused as to what had just happened. Nicodemus cast another blasting text. As the first did, the spell shot away and then blasted a beast into pieces.
This time the lycanthropes bolted for the cover of the trees. The Savanna Walker snarled and snapped at them but then made the same retreat.
Nicodemus grabbed hold of the three remaining targeting sentences floating before him and watched them dance as fishing lines taut with live catch might.
In a moment, the lines stopped moving, which he took to mean that the lycanthropes had found what they considered to be cover.
He cast the three remaining blast spells, the second a few moments after the first, the third a much longer time after the second. He wanted to demonstrate that he was in no particular hurry.
It worked.
Three of the creatures emerged from the trees in a dead sprint away from him.
Of those that remained, one seemed to have gone mad, snarling and snapping as something unseen knocked it over again and again.
Nicodemus grimaced. The beast was being attacked by a ghost. Without cacographic ability to misspell the ghost, the lycanthrope was being bled to death by invisible jaws.
A moment later, the other lycanthrope seemed beset by a similar attacker. The third bolted into a frantic retreat.
Nicodemus looked at the Savanna Walker's blurry image. The monster had run to the aid of his devotee, somehow clearing away the ghosts. But the wolf, confused and terrified, bit the Savanna Walker. The larger monster landed a claw swipe on the creature's head with enough force to make the night resound with the crack of its skull.
The last remaining lycanthrope fled.
That left only Nicodemus and the Walker. The monster was beginning to rant again. Nicodemus called out, “Ja Ambher.”
Instantly the monster's image became sharper. Now Nicodemus saw how the lycanthrope body had become bloated about the chest and belly with the Walker's parasitic human body.
The creature let out a low, forlorn moan: “Ja Ambher. Jaaa Ambher. Ja … Jaaaambher.”
Nicodemus waited.
“Catch me with your iron language. He has, he has. Burned me with my name. Burned. Bhurrrned.” It turned toward Nicodemus: “You want to talk the iron talk, speaking the steel speak. Dirty foul, Nicodemus. Cruel. Talk your iron talk and rub your chin with feces.”
Nicodemus didn't know what any of this meant. He didn't care: “Ja Ambher,” he called again.

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