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Authors: Blake Charlton

BOOK: Spellbound
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“Damn!” Deirdre swore. “Wait.” Boot heels clicked on stone. Something was being dragged. Then came a clanging. It was loud at first but then quieted. The wailing stopped. A muffled bang. Then a stranger cacophony: two voices yelling.
Deirdre's hands returned to Francesca's shoulders. “I think I woke him up from your stunning spell.”
“Woke … who up?”
“The man we put the anklet into. I dropped him on the devotees climbing up. He didn't fall straight down, more tumbled. It knocked them down to the bottom of the minarets, maybe broke a few bones, but they won't stop until they're dead or we are.” She paused. “Listen.”
The wailing was growing louder.
“So what do we do?” Francesca blurted.
“Escape with the kite. There's a cloth ribbon around the jumpchute. It has the wind marshal's emblem on it. What happens if I tear it?”
“Don't you bloody dare!” she cried. “Tearing a magical manu … manu … page sets its sentences free. You don't know—”
“But it might activate the jumpchute?”
Panicked and blind, Francesca reached out and tried to grab the other woman to punctuate her next point. “It might blow both of us into—”
Three more echoing voices joined the other.
“We don't have time!” Deirdre shouted. “There are too many of them down there.”
“Damn it, even if there's a whole bloody legion down there, you'd be mad to—” Francesca started to yell.
But then she heard the loud whisper of tearing cloth.
Shannon ran to the window and thrust his hand into a sunbeam. The light illuminated his tawny skin, his knobby fingers, and the wooden floorboards below them.
His flesh was slightly transparent.
He grabbed his left pinky and pulled. The digit shone golden. With a firm tug, he unraveled the finger into a cylindrical cloud of swirling prose.
He wasn't Shannon, not technically; he was a text.
He released the golden words, and they snapped back into his transparent pinky. He felt his face and found a short beard and mustache, a hooked nose and a cascade of white dreadlocks.
He was a spell written to look like Shannon, to believe he was Shannon. He pressed a hand to his chest. He didn't need to breathe, but his lungs were heaving. He was a ghost: a textual copy of Shannon.
“Creator be merciful!” he whispered, or tried to whisper. His throat was made of golden Numinous runes, which could affect light and text but not the mundane world. “Creator,” he tried to say again but made no sound.
Questions exploded through his mind. How had his author died? Why was he in Avel? And, most pressingly, how was he going to survive?
Only living muscle or a divine body could produce magical runes, and as a ghost he had a finite number of subspells. His every action required a small textual expenditure. To counteract this depletion, wizardly ghosts dwelled in restorative necropoli, found in wizardly academies. If he did not enter a necropolis in the next few days, the ghost would deconstruct. He'd die. Again.
Something was horribly wrong.
The distant wailing grew louder. Then there came a banging, as if doors were being slammed. The ghost had to figure out what was going on. And he had to do so quickly.
He looked at the door. Before the portal lay the remaining sentence fragments.
Odd.
Once broken, Numinous text usually dissolved.
He went to the scrambled sentence. Its author had written the runes in interlocking groups, which had kept them from deconstructing but had also made their parent spell brittle.
The fragments seemed to have broken into discrete piles. He went to the largest and assembled it into the sentence,
find Cleric Francesca DeVega. Only she
… He included the other fragments.
Only she can help you find your murderer.
Though he produced no saliva, the ghost swallowed. His author was not only dead but also murdered? But when?
If a ghost was in its author's body at the moment of death, the ghost became incoherent. That meant that the ghost had been removed before the murder.
But had his author truly been murdered? Who had written this Numinous warning?
A long rune fragment had fallen under the table. He crawled to it and translated the runes into …
must warn Nicodemus!
The ghost groaned soundlessly as a thousand buried memories of Nicodemus Weal surfaced. He remembered the cacographic boy in Starhaven, the unexplained deaths, the hunting for and being hunted by Fellwroth, the emerald, the demon, and … the disease.
That was the sharpest memory of all. During their game of predator-and-prey, Fellwroth had used the emerald to cast a canker curse into Shannon, creating a disease that had begun to slowly kill him. When Nicodemus had briefly possessed the emerald, the boy had slowed the cankers. In the Heaven Tree Valley, it looked as if Shannon would recover. But as the seasons passed, his health had begun to worsen.
The ghost closed his eyes as he remembered his life in the valley. He'd tried to help Nicodemus overcome his disability, but the boy had only become more cacographic. More distressing, Nicodemus's affinity for the kobolds' tattooed language had led him to disregard the wizardly ones. Unduly impressed by his growing strength, Nicodemus had wanted to pursue Typhon. Shannon had disagreed, and they argued bitterly.
The ghost cursed. Shannon had not died of the canker curse; he had been murdered. “I told the boy he had to train longer,” the ghost tried to growl but made no sound.
Suddenly, the ghost's head began to ache. One instant, it felt as if the Shannon-who-had-lived had been a different person. The next instant, the ghost felt as if he was Shannon-who-had-lived: he had all his memories, all his emotions. Was he his author? Perhaps not his author's body, but his mind?
But there was no time for philosophical pondering. Closing his eyes, the
ghost tried to remember when he and Nicodemus had left the Heaven Tree Valley. But it was no good; he had no memory of leaving the valley. This wasn't like before when the memories felt buried. These memories were gone.
The ghost looked for more sentence fragments. Closer to the door, he found a pile of golden runes that he translated into
Hide in books if the constructs discover you. But whatever you do DON'T
…
Spellwrights referred to capitalized script as shouting, and the shouted
DON'T
alarmed Shannon.
DON'T what?
He saw no more shouting nearby, but by lowering his head to the ground, he saw that four rune fragments had slipped under the door and into a hallway.
He examined the door. Solid redwood. As a ghost, he was written almost entirely in Numinous and therefore couldn't open the door. Experimentally, he put a hand on the wood. His fingers disappeared into it.
So he lowered his head and walked through the door. Pain flared in his feet, and buzzing insects seemed to burrow into his ears. Some part of his inner ear—likely the subspell that sensed vibrating air as sound—must be written in Magnus, a silvery language that could affect mundane objects but not light or magical text.
The buzzing passed, and the ghost found himself standing in a hallway: wooden floor, a long white wall with arched windows. Outside shone red-tiled roofs and sandstone minarets. The gutters ran with thin streams of rainwater.
The ghost's feet continued to ache, and suddenly he sank an inch into the floor. Alarmed, he picked up one foot and saw its sole glinted with Magnus. Passing through the door had frayed the silver prose. He sank another inch and fell sideways, expecting to tumble through the floor.
But his hip struck the wooden boards, allowing him to pull his feet out of the floor. Confused, the ghost examined his hip and discovered that two silvery sentences had coiled there. He pressed his hand to the floor and watched a Magnus sentence shoot into his palm to allow him to push against the floor.
At last the ghost understood: his meager Magnus text, which gave him weight, distributed itself so that he could push against what he considered the ground.
The frayed prose on his feet seemed to be repairing itself. When the processes looked complete, the ghost rose into a crouch. Now his feet worked fine. He was about to stand when he saw the Numinous rune sequences that had slipped under the door:
VETHISR, OOMUNTIL, LEA, DARK.
He picked them up. The period after
DARK
meant it should go last. So
VETHISROOMUNTILLEADARK
? He added spaces.
VE THIS ROOM UNTIL LEA DARK?
Close, but not quite. He looked back at the beginning of the sentence … and flinched.
He pulled out first the
LEA
then the
VE,
put them at the front of the fragment, connected it to the beginning, added spaces:
But whatever you do DON'T LEAVE THIS ROOM UNTIL DARK.
Standing, he looked around to discover why he should not have left.
The hallway held only a cold breeze. But outside, on the roof, a long shadow slipped across the red tiles.
He looked up into the sky.
Its long, headless body was as white and flat as newly bleached paper. Sunlight glinted on its four sets of steel talons.
Francesca's hands tingled. Whatever cloth Deirdre ripped must have loosed magical language unknown to her. She held her breath.
Nothing happened.
Outside, the wind snarled.
“Maybe the spells didn't—” Deirdre started to say, and then something yanked Francesca upward with such violence that her chin slammed into her chest.
She screamed first, but Deirdre screamed louder. Something was pulling them upward with stomach-torturing acceleration. Icy wind blasted all about them. The shock of it cleared Francesca's vision and in so doing revealed a world of velocity and color.
Above them, bright against the sapphire sky, billowed a yellow jumpchute full of unseen hierophantic language. From the hemispherical chute blew the furious wind that was buffeting both women as they dangled among the leather harnesses.
Below them stood the massive octagonal dome of Cala's sanctuary, which held the stone ark containing the demigoddess's soul. The sanctuary's reddish-brown roof tiles, still wet from the last rainstorm, glistened with sunlight.
Surrounding the holy structures was the city of Avel—a maze of sandstone buildings, winding alleys, bright gardens. Massive, textually fortified walls divided the city into districts and then cordoned it off from the wilderness beyond.
East of the city, the land descended to the near-endless savanna. The wind made the tall grass sink and rise in long waves. On the horizon, a distant rainstorm was brooding over a cord of faint rainbow.
Francesca, still screaming, spun westward and looked out onto the rolling foothills. The wondrous Dam of Canonist Cala began at the city's northwestern corner and then grew outward to span the deep canyon that formed the city's western edge. Behind the dam, to the north, lay the reservoir. The dark water began as a wide lake but then ran into six twisting narrows as it
snaked into the foothills. Beyond all this, the Auburn Mountains formed a dark skyline.
She and Deirdre flew upward until they rode the wind below a flock of ten or so lofting kites.
Abruptly the chain trailing them snapped taut, halting their climb. The force of the action flung both women upside down and then set them swinging wildly in their harnesses. Above, the jumpchute folded into a massive rectangular canopy.
The sudden halt had stopped the women's screaming, but now their mouths reopened. The world became a whirling blur as they dangled and spun. Francesca thought she might never stop belting out terror, but Deirdre's cry turned into triumphant laugher.
Finally they stopped swinging. The wind was strong and a portion of the kite's canopy occasionally flapped, but otherwise it was surprisingly quiet in the air. “My lady, you said you're semidivine,” Francesca said, “but you never mentioned you're sometimes out of your bloody semidivine mind!”
Deirdre looked over with a smile brighter than any magical sentence. “Out of my bloody mind, but bloody alive and free!” She laughed.
Francesca caught her long braid to keep it from flying about. “My lady, that spell might have blasted us into pulp so fine it would pass through cheesecloth.”
Deirdre pointed down. “Look, there on the infirmary's roof.”
Their course had taken them east; they now flew far above Avel. The wind was coming down off the Auburn Mountains and turning their kite west.
It took Francesca a moment to identify the sanctuary's infirmary. When she did, she realized there was a small area of it that she could not see. The cloud of blindness seemed to be wandering around the roof. “I see blindness.”
Deirdre shook her head. “You see the Savanna Walker. He's come to reclaim me for the demon.”
Francesca grabbed Deirdre's shoulder. “All respect, my lady avatar, but holy loving heaven it is time for you to explain this demon. You think the War of Disjunction is coming?”
The other woman shook her head. “The war's already begun. A demon named Typhon has crossed the ocean. He's imprisoned Canonist Cala and compelled me to become his Regent of Spies—a ringleader for his informants.”
Francesca opened her mouth, but the other woman took her arm. “With the Walker so close, the demon may repossess me any moment now,” Deirdre
said quickly. “Listen, most hierophants in Avel think they serve Cala, but they actually serve Typhon. Once the demon realizes I put you into play, he will send all of his agents to bring you back. Don't return to the sanctuary. You'll be safe in the city for a day or so before they start to comb through it. You must find a man in hiding and take him a message. He used to be in the North Gate District, hiding among the tree worshipers. They call themselves the Canic people. Do you know who they are?”
“Of course.” The Canics were among Avel's poorest citizens. Francesca, more than any other cleric, had treated their sick.
Deirdre continued. “The Canics were protecting this man. But we found them one night last year, killed a few of his students. Find him and tell him—”
“But who is he?”
“A rogue wizardling named Nicodemus Weal. He—”
“Nicodemus God-of-gods damned Weal!” Francesca squawked. “The cacographer who might be the anti-Halcyon, the Storm Petrel? The one who murdered the other cacographers in Starhaven ten years ago?”
Deirdre grimaced and her dangling legs jerked. “That's not what happened.”
Francesca swore. “Damn it, I know I deserved punishment for killing you on my table, but this a bit much. Couldn't you just pull out my tongue or break all my ribs or something quick?”
“This is no time for jokes.”
“You seriously want me to find the most notorious cacographer since James Berr?”
“James Berr?”
“He was the most infamous cacographer until Nicodemus caused all those deaths in Starhaven.”
“You have to find him.” Deirdre said and then grimaced. Again, her legs twitched. “Tell him the demon knows. Tell him there's a trap.”
Suddenly Deirdre's grip went slack and her eyes rolled upward. For a moment, Francesca thought the woman was about to fall into a seizure.
“Trap?” Francesca asked. “What do you mean? What trap?”
Deirdre moaned. “The demon's trying to possess me again. We must separate before that happens.”
“Why?”
“Because once possessed, I'll snap your neck like a twig.”
“All right,” Francesca replied flatly, “you've convinced me. But how in the burning hells are we supposed to separate while in a kite that neither of us can control?”
Deirdre gestured to the other kites. “One of the hierophants.”
Francesca looked up at the flock of lofting kites, each one a colorful rectangular canopy suspending lines and harnesses. There were perhaps ten kites aloft, but less than half held green-robed hierophants. From here, pilots watched for signs of grass fires or lycanthrope migration. Similarly, four or five pilots would be flying over city walls to help the watchmen spot approaching lycanthropes.
Most of the pilots seemed preoccupied with their rigs, moving hands along the suspension lines. But one red kite emblazoned with a golden sunburst was moving down toward them.
“When you find Nicodemus,” Deirdre said, “don't touch him, not even for an instant. He's cursed.”
Francesca looked at the other woman. “Blood and damnation, I don't even want to see him. Look, if I'm really going to do this, I need to know more about this demon and this trap.”
The other woman pressed a shaking hand to her cheek. “I did some … you might have help from … I don't know if he survived to … I'm not a spellwright …” Her hand shook more violently. She was having trouble speaking. “Typhon's trying to possess … .”
Suddenly a loud voice boomed, “Ahoy to the last kite aloft!” Francesca turned to see that the red kite had flown within thirty feet. Its pilot was a short man wrapped in heavy green robes. His head and face were covered by a hierophant's turban and veil. As she watched, he pulled down the veil to reveal a handsome face, with light brown skin and a kempt black beard. Even at a distance, Francesca recognized the spellwright and felt her throat tighten.
“Creator,” she whispered, “God-of-gods, your ability to punish me for my failures is proving more awesome every passing moment. Must it be him of all people?”
Beside her, Deirdre looked more composed. Her arms had stopped shaking. She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, “Ahoy to the air warden! We are in crisis!”
A booming laugh replied. “I can see that. How'd you jump without a hierophant?”
“Warden, I do not jest. I am an officer of Canonist Cala. The sanctuary and infirmary are under attack.”
The red kite swerved closer. “Speak today's passwords.”
“Granite fire south,” Deirdre replied, and waited for the man to nod. “I charge you in the name of the Celestial Canon to personally evacuate my passenger to the wind garden. Don't bring her back to the city until you have gotten word that the sanctuary is safe again. Trust no other wind mage. Tell no one what I have said or even that you spoke to me.”
Francesca grabbed the other woman's shoulder. “Not him!” she said. “Any other hierophant. Please, not him.”
Deirdre pushed her hand away. “No, he's the new air warden, newly arrived. Typhon brought him back because he's unaware of the canonist's situation. He's a screen.”
Francesca had no idea what the other woman was talking about. She was about to say so as colorfully as she possibly could when a sudden jerk on their chain yanked their kite down five feet.
Francesca's stomach seemed to leap into her throat. “What's happening?” She looked down at the infirmary roof. The Savanna Walker's cloud of blindness now hung over the minaret to which their kite was tethered.
Deirdre swore. “He's pulling us in!”
“He's pulling you in,” the air warden called. “I can't take your passenger if the tower is hauling you down.”
Another jerk pulled their kite down ten more feet. “The Walker's figured out which chain connects to our kite,” Deirdre said.
Again they sank with sickening speed. The air warden lowered his kite to keep company. Francesca asked, “What happens if the Savanna Walker pulls us in?”
“The Walker devours you, the demon enslaves me forever, Nicodemus walks into his trap, and the dread god Los is reborn.”
“Can we fight?”
The avatar shook her head. “Not a chance. I'm too near being possessed again, and I don't know the Walker's name. You must go now. Here's my message to Nicodemus about the trap. Are you listening?”
She nodded.
“Tell him there are two dragons.”
“Two WHAT? You're—”
Deirdre cut her off. “The demon said your function will be to keep Nicodemus alive during his forced conversion. I think the demon means to wound Nico in some way that only you can cure.”
“I don't know—”
“Typhon has been holding something back. Over the years, pretending to work as his Regent of Spies, I went through his letters. I learned that Typhon started to make the Savanna Walker into the first dragon, but then the power of the emerald wore out. So the Walker is stuck as a half monster, half dragon.”
“A God-of-gods damned dragon? With scales and wings and fiery breath?”
Deirdre shook her head. “They look that way only under certain conditions. Dragons are more like potentials or forces. And the Walker is now something grotesque and incomprehensible.”
Abruptly, Deirdre shuddered. Then she squeezed her eyes shut as if in concentration. “Listen, in one of the demon's letters you are named as the only one who can stop the second dragon from destroying Nicodemus. I don't know any more than that. As the Regent of Spies, I had some of my agents magically wound me when the lycanthropes attacked so that I would be taken to you in the infirmary. I had to put you into play.”
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
“When I broke your anklet, I broke his hold on you. You can leave the city now without his knowing. You have to stop the second dragon.”
“But why me?” Francesca squawked. “And what in burning heaven do I know about demons or dragons?”
Deirdre shook her head. “No time. Go!”
“Go where, damn it?”
Instead of answering, the other woman turned to face the air warden and bellowed, “FALLING PILOT!”
Francesca turned to see which hierophant had fallen from a lofting kite. But as she did so, Deirdre reached up and—as easily as if she were snapping threads—broke the straps of Francesca's harness.

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