Spellbound (47 page)

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Authors: Blake Charlton

BOOK: Spellbound
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She knew what she would do; she wasn't sure why or even if it was what she wanted to do. Just then, it didn't matter.
She placed her left hand on top of Nicodemus's head, and slid her smallest finger into Nicodemus's skull and pressed.
The canker curse would now be coursing through her hand, misspelling her Language Prime.
But Francesca kept her finger steady. She waited, in a strange state of calm, for her patient's bleeding to stop.
When the bleeding stopped, Francesca dabbed the blood from the operating field. Her finger hadn't bulged into a canker; likely her Language Prime text had been misspelled in another way. Perhaps the cankers were spreading to her lungs or stomach. She used the pair of narrow forceps to pull blood clots off of Nicodemus's brain and then stitched his wound shut. During the last few stitches, he seemed to groan. At least, she imagined that's what he did when his mouth opened.
She talked to him, telling him he was going to live, that everything was going to be all right, that he shouldn't move. A half hour later he was sitting up and blinking at her. Now that the pressure was off his brain, he was more or less healthy—the skull fracture and hole drilled down to his brain would not affect him unless he was again struck in the head.
Using Numinous, she told Nicodemus that she would be back and stepped out of the solarium in search of a private room. Finding several up on the third floor, she returned to Nicodemus and motioned for him to follow.
He got off the table and discovered he could stand without trouble. But he clearly mistrusted his legs and walked far behind her, no doubt worried about falling forward and touching her. She hadn't yet told him that cankers were already inside her. His concern tightened her throat.
They entered a simple room: a cot, a pillow, several folded cotton blankets, a washstand. A room fitting for a physician's death.
Francesca cast a few flamefly paragraphs to curve lazy circuits across the ceiling and wondered if they would be the last spells she ever wrote.
Nicodemus sat on the cot, removed his boots, and lay down. When she sat next to him, he scooted away and looked fearfully at their proximity.
“Nico, during the operation, you bled briskly,”
she wrote and then floated into his lap.
“I had to touch you for a long time.”
When he read this last sentence, he held perfectly still, as if all his muscles had contracted, paralyzing him in the moment before horror set it. Then, slowly, he looked at her. His lips parted, his breath coming fast.
She reached out to take his hand.
He pulled it back.
“Please,” she said, and without warning the tears came. She was frightened. It was a simple fear, like a child alone in the dark.
Nicodemus leaned closer but pulled his hands farther away. His eyes were wide with confusion.
Softly crying, she put her hand on the cot.
He looked at her fingers as if they were scorpions. Tentatively, he moved his hands toward hers but then stopped. He looked her in the face.
“I'm afraid …” she tried to say “ … of what will happen next.” The visible world was blurred with tears. She shut her eyes.
A moment later his hand touched hers. She could feel the trembling in his arm, the barely suppressed reflex to snatch his hand back. She interlaced her fingers into his and squeezed. Slowly, he returned the squeeze.
Francesca let out a long, shuddering breath and felt the sharp boundary of her life—all that she had wanted to achieve but had not, the loneliness to which she had committed herself.
Suddenly Nicodemus jerked her hand up.
She opened her eyes and blinked away the tears to find him stooped over her hand. He turned it over, splayed her fingers, poured his eyes over every aspect of each digit. Then he looked up at her with narrowed eyes as if she had just told an egregious lie.
She leaned away from him. “What?”
He wrote a sentence and pressed it into her palm. She translated into
“I'm not mispelling you.”
“Not misspelling what?”
He grabbed her wrist and held her hand up as if it was the most obvious piece of evidence yet seen by human eyes. With his other hand he pointed to it as if to conclude his argument.
“Nico, I touched only a small part of your brain. I couldn't have destroyed all of your God-of-gods damned sense”
she wrote, before adding,
“as little of it as you have.”
He grabbed her hand. He let it go. With both of his hands, he grabbed every part of her arm. Then he pulled both of his hands away, and gestured to her arm as if dramatically presenting a bar of solid gold. He wrote:
“You're Langauge Prime text is not misspeling, otherwise yu'd have chankers wherever I touched you.”
She looked at him with bewilderment.
“Maybe you've sent the canker curses to another part of my body?”
He shook his head.
“When I touch you, I seanse all your Langage Prim. Notthing is misspelled.”
They stared at each other for a long moment. Then she asked.
“Maybe you're not cacographic anymore?”
He read this, frowned, and then wrote a Numinous spell on his bicep and cast it away from the bed. Francesca couldn't tell what the text was intended to do, but it fell to the ground and shattered. They both watched the fragments writhe and spin into nothing.
Francesca wrote,
“I'm guessing that's a ‘no.'”
“Yeh,”
he replied while still looking at the pieces,
“maybe you shuold have mashed a deferent part of my brian.”
“The brain in question was too small to encourage experimentation.”
He seemed to laugh at the remark but didn't reply, only looked back at her undiseased hand.
She looked at him. He looked at her.
“So, if you're still cacographic,”
she wrote,
“and you don't misspell my Language Prime, what does that mean?”
They stared at each other in silence. At first Francesca's mind raced with complex and frightening ideas about her own unknown nature. But like grains of sand shifting through the waist of an hourglass, all her chaotic speculations narrowed to a simple procession of practical thoughts that were neither complex nor frightening.
Judging by the look on Nicodemus's face, his thoughts were running the same course.
She pressed herself on top of him, wrapping her hand around the back of his neck to pull his mouth up to hers; even as he sat up into her, sliding one arm around her waist to pull her closer. Their lips met with too much force, and they both reflexively pulled back to halt the mash of teeth to lips.
They separated. Paused. Became more fully aware of what they were doing. Tried again.
But once more they pushed too hard into each other, feeling the urgent warmth of tongues before pulling slightly away in a confused desire for both consummation and temperance, like drinking fine wine when dying of thirst. So great was the need to take deep, intoxicating gulps of each other that each gulp made them regret the loss of savoring.
He pulled her down onto the cot so they lay side by side, face-to-face, and with cautious trial and glorious error they taught themselves to take slow, soft-lipped sips of each other.
 
WHEN THEY HAD
at last schooled themselves in patience, Francesca climbed on top of Nicodemus. She peeled off her robes until she was bare to the waist. After a moment's thought, she cast a Magnus spell on the
door handle that bound it to an iron cleat on the frame, ensuring their privacy.
Nicodemus looked at her body, drinking her in with his eyes. Tentatively, as if still afraid his touch would hurt, he ran his right hand up her side, avoiding her breast, to gently hold her face.
She pressed her cheek against his palm and whispered that it would be okay, that he didn't have to worry. But when she unlaced his shirt, she found her own hands were trembling. He sat up and they peeled off his shirt. Then he lay down and she put her head on his chest, her right hand splayed across his broad pectoral muscle. Their hues marked each other out—his brown skin both darker and brighter in contrast to her fairness.
His muscle tensed beneath her fingers as it formed a golden sentence that floated up. She translated his prose on his skin:
“I've nevar had a lover.”
She sat on top of him and smiled in a way that she hoped would show him both of her dimples. To reassure him, she forged a sentence in her own right pectorals and brought his hand up to her breast to translate it:
“Just don't write anything too stupid and we'll fix that.”
For a moment he stared at her as if she were the only woman in creation. Then he wrote,
“What about concpetion? We must not get you with child.”
“We're both spellwrights,”
she reminded him. Spellwrights were generally sterile. Very rarely a spellwright and an illiterate could conceive a child, but no two spellwrights ever had.
After reading this, Nicodemus nodded, but then wrote,
“Is it safe? You just drilled through my skull.”
She nodded.
“As long as you don't strain yourself.”
Finally he stopped looking frightened and smiled.
“I was hoping to strain myself.”
“I was hoping you would too.”
“Guess I'll have to strain you instead.”
She laughed.
“Let your hair down?”
he asked.
Smiling, she undid her braid and used her fingers to comb out her locks until they hung loose around them.
He brought her down into an embrace, and soon they wore no covers but each other.
 
LATER THE FLAMEFLY paragraphs began to snow down around them as glowing sentence fragments. She lay with her head on his chest, feeling his heart's two-beat kick. As she drifted down into a dream, she began to see the sound of his heart: the first beat a bright vivid purple, lub, the second a beat of dark blue fading into black, dub.
Lub dub … lub dub … lub dub …
Color and sound and the softness of his skin: all the sensations of the world swirling into one rhythm without end.
Lub dub … lub dub … lub dub … as the dream enfolded her into deeper sleep.
Sitting on a ruined crate, Lotannu pulled a blanket around his shoulders and glowered. Though dawn was at least an hour away, a crowd of caravan wagons, horses, and men clustered before the gate.
The Savanna Walker's romp through Coldlock had convinced many of the town's inhabitants that another attack was coming and that they would be safer in Avel. Sadly, given what would soon take wing for Avel, the frightened souls would be in even greater danger in the city.
Lotannu took in a deep breath and wondered once again if he should join the caravan. “There's no room on any of the wagons,” a woman said behind him. He jumped to his feet and faced her. Like him she was bundled up in a wool blanket. She'd wrapped her head so that only her face was exposed to the chill morning air. “Praise the Creator!” he whispered.
She motioned for him to sit back down. “Don't draw attention,” she said, sitting on a nearby crate. “I doubt anyone would recognize us here. But it's better to be safe.”
“The thing didn't kill you?”
She grimaced. “At the moment, I wish that it had.”
He looked into her bright green eyes. It was disorienting to see her this way.
She stared at the gate. “I woke behind that tavern,” she murmured. “An unsavory-looking man was turning me over. I can't imagine his intentions were good. But when he touched my skin—” She paused. “When he touched my skin, his hands bulged out into pale cankers.”
Lotannu felt as if he'd been punched in the gut. “You misspell Language Prime?”
“I misspell every language.”
He closed his eyes and exhaled, trying to wrap his mind around all the implications.
“We remain in Coldlock,” she said. “The fleet knows we sent a colaboris spell from the lighthouse. They will send an airship to find us.”
He looked at her calm expression. “Your ability to spell has been taken?”
She nodded. “The Savanna Walker stole it.”
“You are still the Halcyon of course.”
“Until we hunt down that beast and recover my ability to spell, I will be like my half brother.” She looked away. “I will be a second Storm Petrel.”
 
FRANCESCA WOKE TO
small bright-orange flashes moving across her vision.
She sat up. The flashes diminished and then vanished. For a moment, the world made no sense. At first she thought she was in the infirmary in Avel but then realized she was in Coldlock.
Dawn was breaking through the window. She recalled the strange new realities of her life: the flight from the infirmary, the city's fomenting conflict, her loss of memories and hearing, Nicodemus.
Fearfully, she looked down. But he was still there—broad torso, dark face, a black halo of splayed-out hair. Relief spread through her. He was the one memory she was happy to recover.
Again the shower of orange flashes spread across her vision. They seemed to have leapt out of Nicodemus's mouth. She jumped.
She was not seeing these flashes with her eyes. With her eyes she was looking at Nicodemus's peaceful expression. But at the same time, in a different visual field, she saw tiny orange flashes. It was as if she was seeing through another pair of eyes that were not her own.
Again the flashes diminished and then vanished.
This was not the glow of magical text. She knew that. When the lights returned she noticed they coincided with Nicodemus's breath: multiplying on inhalation, diminishing on exhalation.
She laid a hand on her lover's chest. He inhaled, and the orange flashes spread away from his face and across her strange new vision. She also felt a slight shuddering vibration in her hand; her lover was snoring.
She was seeing his snores?
She poked his ribs. The scattered orange dots coalesced over his mouth into a red flare and vanished. Nicodemus rolled toward her. Where there had been flashes of his snoring, now there was only pale light over his mouth that ebbed and flowed in time with the rise and fall of his chest.
She was looking at the noise of his breath. It was a white noise. This was strange synesthesia indeed. All spellwrights could perceive proximity to unknown magical language as a vague, nonvisual sensation. But this was wholly different. No magical text was involved. She was seeing sound.
Then she remembered: just before falling asleep, she had seen Nicodemus's heart sounds. Could she see only sounds he made?
“Francesca?” she whispered and jumped as her auditory sight registered a firework of lavender and white.
She snapped her fingers next to her left ear and saw to her left a flash of a glossy black surface, like polished onyx. She snapped another finger behind her head and saw, more faintly, the same bright black sound behind her.
Her ears still perceived sound. But now their nerves were connected not to an auditory portion of her brain, but to a visual one. She frowned down at Nicodemus. He muttered something blue in his sleep. Normally she would have found this adorable, possibly even poetic … a lover mutters blue. Now she found it obnoxious. Had he just misspelled the nerves to her brain? Was that even possible?
Two years ago, Francesca had treated a musician with perfect pitch who knew what note was played on a guitar because of “the color it made.” Francesca had written a long entry about her in her clinical journal.
Casting two flamefly paragraphs above her, Francesca climbed out of bed and padded over to the door. The air was chilly, and she had nothing other than her long curls to cover herself. She found the journal underneath the rumpled wool blanket.
After casting more flameflies, Francesca sat on her heels and opened the book. Instantly, she jumped back as a ghostly head and shoulder popped out of the book. She'd forgotten that they had used the journal to store Shannon's ghost.
But the specter that was pouring onto the cold floor stones was not an august man with long white dreadlocks; it was a tall woman with fair skin, long brown hair, and a physician's red stole around her neck. Francesca froze, awash in confusion.
The ghost sat up and blinked as she looked around the room. When the ghost's eyes fell on Francesca, she smiled and began to stand. As Francesca rose, the world seemed to spin. The ghost's face was an older version of her own.
It made no sense; Francesca had never written a ghost, had never even started to ghostwrite. The construct's smile remained benign, dreamlike. The ghost held out a transparent hand, palm out. Slowly, Francesca mirrored the gesture, holding her hand up to the ghost's. They touched. Gentle warmth filled Francesca's hand and then spilled down her arm.
The ghost stepped forward so that more of their arms coincided. Warmth spread throughout Francesca. The ghost turned around so that they were facing the same direction. Francesca stepped forward, and they stood in the same place; they were the same being, text and body.
Then Francesca knew everything the ghost knew. She was everything the ghost was and was everything the ghost's author had been.
She had been born under a different name three hundred years ago in
the Burnt Hills, studied wizardly languages in Astrophell, medicine in Port Mercy. She had taken up her first clerical appointment not in the backwater of Avel—as she somehow would do hundreds of years later—but in the prestigious Infirmary of Chandralu, winning recognition as a master physician.
The memories of these experiences tumbled through her mind to produce a sensation that was at once otherworldly and yet also manifestly true. This was her true self. Some small part of her had always known this.
After Chandralu she had taken an appointment in the Infirmary of Trillinon, where she had overseen the building of a second infirmary outside the city walls to serve the growing population.
Her infirmary had been a great success, and soon she was approached by a secret society who controlled much of the city's wealth and business. She had joined their ranks and over the years had been brought to understand that they were demon worshipers. She had met Typhon, who convinced her that the Disjunction had already begun and that demon ascendency need not be violent. With the assistance of his devotees, Typhon would usher in a new golden age. Should the War of Disjunction end in her time, Francesca would become his chief cleric. If she would expire beforehand, he should appoint her ghost to the same position.
She had pledged herself to Typhon.
As was necessary for a demon worshiper, she had worked out of public view and without celebrity, even within her own infirmary. But using her influence, she had won funds and political support. In the last third of her life, she'd built up the infirmary's facilities and reputation to rival that of its counterpart within the city walls. Under her guidance, the amount of charity care given to the city's poorest tripled.
She had recruited the sharpest clerics to the Disjunction. She had provided Disjunction agents with medical training and set up care facilities for cells performing military action. She had even provided medical advice for assassination of several spellwrights thought to be sympathetic to the Disjunction's enemies.
A hundred years ago, on Typhon's orders, she had undertaken a rigorous ghostwriting, producing a text far more robust than any other ghost then inhabiting Astrophell's necropolis. On the day of her death, she had inscribed herself on a large codex in a private library. Typhon planned to withdraw her from the book once the War of Disjunction began. But the plans had changed; Typhon had withdrawn her from the book ten years ago. He had needed to replicate some of her text.
That was all she remembered.
Francesca stood inhumanly still.
Some part of her was horrified. But more overwhelmingly she was caught in a sudden rush of understanding. So many things made sense now. Her persistent old-fashioned accent had come not from the hinterlands but the distant past. Her ambitions were her own, part of her nature, but she had always believed she was a failure because she hadn't become a master physician in Chandralu or Trillinon. This insecurity had come from the just-barely-perceived discrepancy between her own life course and that of her author.
In fact, when appreciating Vivian's talent and prestige, Francesca had experienced pangs of envy that had felt as if they came from someone else. And they had come from someone else. They had come from her author.
Slowly, Francesca looked at Nicodemus. Her heart ached for what they could have been together.
Now she understood that Nicodemus perceived her Language Prime as bright because Typhon had written her with the emerald and with his godspell to withstand Nicodemus's cacographic touch. His synesthesic reaction was a flush of warmth across the cheeks, which would have felt like a blush caused by his attraction to her.
The Savanna Walker had tried to pull the memories from her brain but had failed because she did not have a human brain. The Walker had instead destroyed the part of her textual mind responsible for hearing. Later, when making love to Nicodemus, her mind had appropriated his cacography to rewrite itself so it could perceive sound.
She understood then that Nicodemus caused language near him to become not only more chaotic but also more intuitive. Francesca was a creature of intuitive language; therefore, Nicodemus's effect on her was transformative.
Her thoughts moved faster and faster. Her intellect was rapidly developing away from a human mind into something with a hyperacute perception of the past and a perception of the most probable futures. She was embarking into a powerful quaternary cognition.
This skill for perceiving time, she realized, had always been manifest in her ability to prognosticate, to look into time and see the possible future bodies of her patients.
Now, her perception of time extended beyond bodies and she could see the potential of entire cities and realms. She now perceived the future as a three-dimensional and eternally descending landscape. She had to travel down this landscape, forward through time. But there was room for lateral alteration.
Francesca could see how Typhon had set forces into a temporal ravine, trying to force her and all others into the Disjunction. Now she understood
why the Savanna Walker had attacked Vivian and not Nicodemus. The nature of the second dragon became clear to her. Typhon had been more successful than he had ever imagined he could be.
Suddenly fear filled Francesca's stomach. Typhon had written her to perceive time as a landscape. He would have taken precautions to ensure that she would execute his designs despite, or even because of, her sensitivity.
She was predestined to initiate the Disjunction.
When her hands began to shake, she looked at them and saw that they glowed with the Numinous prose of her ghost. Suddenly her fear gave way to indignity. What kind of half-brained author wrote a woman's soul, full of desire for freedom, into a construct he then trapped into a predestined outcome? Typhon either delighted in torturing his own creations or was too damn dim to figure out what he was doing.

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