Spellbound (43 page)

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Authors: Blake Charlton

BOOK: Spellbound
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“You of all people should understand,” Cyrus replied hotly. “You've dedicated your life to the hope of ending your disability. How could you deny her that same hope?”
Suddenly it was all Nicodemus could do to keep from shouting or striking the hierophant. Yet in the depths of his boiling rage, he knew there was a core of truth in the other man's words. He'd used hope like firewood, set it constantly burning under him to heat his life. He placed his face in his hands and, as calmly as he could, said, “I will believe whatever Francesca chooses to believe about her lost hearing.”
Cyrus was silent for a long moment. “One more thing. Help me convince Francesca not to go with you into Coldlock Harbor. She will be safer staying with the fleet.”
Nicodemus snorted. “You think she'll listen to me?”
“I'm going to tell her that we both agree.”
“I might not know her well, but I know her well enough not to argue if she has her mind set.”
“I'm going to tell her we agree. If she insists on doing it her way, you must keep her safe.”
“If Deirdre was correct, the opposite is more likely to happen.”
Cyrus looked away to the cloth-covered window. “I don't hold anything against you.” His words were filled with anger and yet seemed completely earnest.
“Nor I, you,” Nicodemus said as evenly as he could.
“I'll be in an officer's quarters two doors down. Find me if you have a desperate need. Otherwise stay in here. We'll be aloft in two hours.” He left.
Nicodemus lay back down and closed his eyes. The racket of two squalling gulls grew louder and then receded. Nicodemus felt his anger calm and then surge as he turned over Cyrus's denial of Francesca's new disability. Dimly he sensed that part of his rage was directed at himself. He hated the idea of giving Francesca false hope, and yet he had dedicated most of his adult life to recovering the emerald—a hope that at its core was a denial of his disability and his wholeness despite that disability.
Another pair of complaining gulls flew by and Nicodemus felt the last
of his anger wash out of him. He wondered what it would be like to give up his hope of recovering the emerald. He thought about what it had been like to see Francesca so distressed at losing her hearing and yet seeing her as so completely whole and beautiful.
Then, slowly, Nicodemus felt himself falling asleep. Footsteps and the mumble of low conversation sounded in some nearby hallway. The droning voices echoed and altered musically as they do sometimes in half dreams.
He wasn't aware of time passing, but then he partly awoke. It took a moment to realize what had changed, but then he recognized that the droning voices had become staccato breaths punctuated by a few brief moans. Two hierophants locking lips or making love. Annoyed, Nicodemus rolled over and then pulled the sheets over his head. He fell back into sleep … sometime later he rolled over … sleep …
A door opened, and he sat up suddenly. Francesca closed the door behind her and glared at him. Some of her curls had escaped her braid. Her red physician's stole was curiously tucked into her collar.
She backhanded a paragraph at Nicodemus.
He caught it and translated, trying to introduce as few misspellings as possible.
“I'd say you had the inteligance of a drunkan tadpole, but I don't want to insult an ampfibian. Why under a flaming haeven gave you and Cyrus the NERVE to deside what I will do when we reach Coldlock Harbuor. I should …”
Nicodemus stopped reading and let his cacography deconstruct the text.
He cast,
“Whatever Cyrus told you was exhagerated. I don't suffer under the illushion that you care what I think.”
As she read this, he frowned at her disheveled curls and how her stole was tucked into her collar until suddenly he made a connection. He felt cold and nauseated.
Francesca threw several paragraphs at him, but he let them strike his skin and misspell. He flicked
“Plaese go”
at her and then turned away to face the wall. He pulled the blankets up to his shoulders.
A shower of luminescent sentences began to fall on the bedsheet before him. He closed his eyes. A moment later, Francesca tried shaking his bed. He didn't move.
“Nicodemus!” she said in a monotonous voice. “Nicodemus, look at me!”
He didn't move.
Suddenly a hand landed on his leg. He reflexively jerked away and sat up. Francesca had touched the blanket over his leg, not his leg itself. Nevertheless, he wound the blanket around his hands and grabbed her wrist.
Ignoring her protests, he studied each of her fingers, ensuring she did not have a canker curse.
When he finished, he then pushed her hand away with the blanket.
“You cuold have killed yourslef!”
He was about to turn away when he saw her expression, her mouth parted, her eyes wide as if in shock.
“Why ar you acting this way?”
“You forgot to pull your stol back after Cyrus.”
She read this and then looked at him as if he were soft in the head. He pointed to her collar. She looked down and pulled her stole back out.
“Cyrus had noting to do with it,”
she wrote.
“I was naping too rooms over.”
The nausea moved though Nicodemus again.
“You couldn't here the noise you too made. You couldn't hear yourself moaning.”
Francesca became perfectly still. Her face didn't change.
“Pleas go now,”
Nicodemus cast at her and turned back toward the wall.
He heard her take a step away from the bed, then another. “Nicodemus,” she said.
For a moment he didn't move, but then he rolled over. She handed him,
“It wasn't wat you think.”
“It's none of my busness.”
He started to turn away again, but she laid a hand on his leg. Even through the blankets the sensation of being touched was a shock. “
We didnt have sex
,” she wrote with a physician's frankness.
“I wuold have sent him away. But he was their and afectinate and everything's gone to hell and don't be so blasted upset. We were just locking lips and holding each other because we are GOD-OF-GODS DAMNED SCARED! It wasn't anytihng immportant.”
“
It's none of my busnes.
”
She was pressing her lips together hard enough to blanch.
“And now I'm sory about how I acted in the tent the other nite. I meant everything I said. You understood about dissability in a way no one else could. But eveyrthing is confused and I can't ever touch you.”
When he read these last few words, Nicodemus flinched.
“Your wright,”
he wrote.
“It's dangerus.”
She didn't move for a long moment. Then she held out, “
I'm sory.
”
“Their's nothing to be sorry about,”
he wrote and rolled over.
He could hear her breath quaver. Then, blessedly, she walked out and closed the door. He lay there and tried to think about anything but her.
 
LURRIKARA ISLAND ROSE sharply from the sea. At some primordial time, the island's cliffs might have been dark gray, but millennia and millions of seagulls had painted them white with a paste of their droppings and feathers.
The hierophants were flying the
Queen's Lance
low as they approached the island. Nicodemus could now see the massive gray bodies of elephant seals gliding through the dark seawater.
As the
Queen's Lance
flew over the cliff, it changed from an arrowlike shape to that of a broad-winged bird. The air around Nicodemus grew violent as they cut a tight circle coming up off the coast.
As the vessel rewove itself, it moved Francesca beside him. For most of the flight, she had been forward of him and too far away to correspond. Now, if she chose, she could hand him a sentence.
He kept his eyes on the island. Beyond the cliff stretched craggy highlands covered with grass and a few palms trees. Small homesteads, clusters of round wooden houses, were spread across the landscape. Near these Nicodemus could discern small herds of goats, dirty white and shaggy brown. From the corner of his eye, Nicodemus saw Francesca look over at him. After a while she looked back down.
The
Queen's Lance
glided along the coast. At one point the cliff wall turned inland to form a wide bay of two or three miles. Inside the bay, the cliffs were broken, like a set of stairs, into increasingly larger plateaus.
On the flatlands stood small houses built of stone and covered with thatch. More impressively, into the sheer face of the cliffs were carved intricate façades, doors, windows, and even balconies. Broad switchback stairs had been carved from one plateau to the next. All across the bay were fishing boats interspersed with larger trading vessels.
This was the island city of Kara.
Above the plateaued city stood a single gray spike. This would be the sanctuary of the Canonist Sabir, whose affinity for stone had allowed him to carve the city out of the cliffs. In the early days of the Spirish realm, Sabir and Cala had been consorts. When their deities had argued, Avel and Kara had briefly gone to war, but for centuries now they had enjoyed close diplomatic and mercantile ties.
A few lofting kites were tethered above the sanctuary. As the
Queen's Lance
approached, a white kite with a golden sun on its canopy shot up from the city before flying beside the warship. It loosed a long trail of flags. The pilot seemed to be waving. Nicodemus looked aft and saw the
Queen's Lance
now trailed flags of her own. The kite broke company to glide back down to the sanctuary.
The
Queen's Lance
flew for a quarter hour more over highlands. Then, as they neared the island's southern tip, Francesca pointed out to sea.
When Nicodemus looked in that direction, he started. There were twenty of them arranged in a circle. Each was as tall and thin as a
Starhaven tower. Delicate, arching bridges connected each structure to its neighbors.
He'd heard of this place as a child. The ruins of a city built by the two ancient races: the aquatic Pelagiacs and another humanoid people who had once inhabited Lurrikara Island. The Neosolar Empire had driven both peoples off the island and far out into the open ocean.
The defeated humanoids had left behind this ring of interconnected sea towers. Apparently, from a boat sailing beneath them, one could look down into the murky water and see the towers extend down into an underwater city.
It made sense, Nicodemus thought, that the towers should resemble Starhaven's; the Pelagiacs and the lost people of Lurrikara were undoubtedly Chimerical peoples like the Chthonics who built Starhaven. They must have had similar architectural techniques.
As the
Queen's Lance
neared the structure, Nicodemus could make out long, plumelike windcatchers that had been tethered to every level of the towers. The Lurrikara wind garden.
When only a mile away from the towers, the
Queen's Lance
came around into the wind to approach a wide bridge.
Francesca pointed off toward the horizon, where there brooded clouds so massive they seemed to be a distant mountain range. Francesca offered Nicodemus a golden sentence. Grudgingly, he took it and translated:
“Incomming storm?”
“I supose.”
“Cyrus had beter delivar his reports quickly or we'll have to weight out the storm here.”
Nicodemus nodded at this but didn't reply.
As they made final approach to the towers, he noticed that not all the rigs tethered to the towers were windcatchers. Five of them were much larger than the others and lacked cylindrical hulls.
Nicodemus frowned at these larger cloth constructs until he realized they were warships. Three were narrow vessels with four or five wind mages scurrying about each. Cruisers, he supposed.
The two largest warships were different. Instead of being shaped like an arrow or a blade, these ships were rounded, almost spherical. At their tops bulged several lofting sails; below these hung layers of stiff cloth wings, each one suspended above the other to form an array. Sunlight glinted off small metallic squares sewn into the cloth.
A coldness filled Nicodemus's stomach, and suddenly he felt foolish for being so upset by a woman whom he would never be able to touch. Compared
with the sheer magnitude of death this construct could inflict, his jealousy of Cyrus was a trifle.
Francesca was also looking at the massive warships. When she glanced at Nicodemus, he met her eyes. She handed him a sentence: “
What are thay?
”
“I've nevar seen one before, but juging by what Cyrus discribed to me, I'd guess they're cariers.”

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