Spellbreaker (11 page)

“There's no safe place!” She raised two of her hands in clenched fists and suddenly the deck bucked. Nicodemus fell forward.

“The hull's cracking!” yelled a muffled voice that Nicodemus recognized as Rory's. He glimpsed the druid's white robes as the man pulled himself up from the hatch. “Nico, she's using her godspell to batter the ship. If we go under, we all die!”

The River Goddess hissed. With one of her arms she grabbed Nicodemus's foot and with the other she started to drive a dirk into his calf. But where she touched him, the blue-green fire of her aura vanished as his cacography misspelled her godspell.

She shrieked and pulled her hand back. Her knife had not sunk more than an inch into Nicodemus's calf.

Nicodemus had lost the sword text, but he was close enough now that it did not matter. He lurched forward and caught one of the River Thief's wrists. Her cyan aura winked out where he touched and she screamed.

“Goddess, you have to yield!” Again the boat heaved. Nicodemus and the neodemon slid across a deck to slam into the gunnel.

“We're taking on water!” Rory yelled.

“Goddess!” Nicodemus yelled. “Yield!”

“I cannot,” the River Thief gasped while trying to free her arm from Nicodemus's grasp. With two of her other arms, she grabbed the top of the gunnel.

“Don't let her into the water!” Rory cried just as the neodemon shrieked, “Let me go!”

“Yield!” Nicodemus bellowed.

She continued to struggle, all her arms flailing. Something sharp cut into Nicodemus's shoulder. “There can be peace no more!” the neodemon yelled. “I see her now. She will end this world!”

Nicodemus caught another of her hands. Their faces were now inches apart; her blank white eyes stared into his green ones. “Peace no more,” she whispered, and then, instead of trying to escape, she wrapped all her arms and her legs around Nicodemus. The air around them crackled as his cacography misspelled her.

“Wait,” Nicodemus cried. “Wait, you—” He needed to know why she was wearing his daughter's face and if she truly was a demon of the Ancient Continent. But the River Thief grasped him tighter. In a blaze of blue and green scintilla, she dissolved into light and air.

Nicodemus found himself lying in darkness, bleeding onto the deck.

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

Francesca DeVega watched the sailors race about the deck and swarm over the rigging. To the east, dawn limned the Ixonian headlands with sunlight. The new day was dappled with seaborne clouds.

The sight made Francesca's chest tighten, a familiar sensation since leaving Starfall Island a month ago. The news she was bringing Nicodemus could not be trusted to a messenger or colaboris spell, so she had been forced to leave the Dralish pantheon to the chaos it called self-governance. If the Council had been successful, warships were even now sailing toward Chandralu. Compounding Francesca's political worries was the anticipation of reunion with her husband and daughter. So, a lovely jaunt through the tropics this would not be. Pity. She could use one.

Last night Francesca had woken in her cabin with the knowledge that an unknown sea deity was circling below their ship. It was a strong divine presence; one that made Francesca's textual mind flare into prophetic calculation. As had happened only briefly since her confrontation with Typhon thirty years ago, Francesca had perceived the future as a landscape into which she was traveling.

It had been a fleeting glimpse, and she had gained only three insights. First, the deity swimming below her might, in the coming days, kill her. Second, most of her futures and the sea deity's futures intersected at Chandralu's infirmary. How, she couldn't say. And third, the coming events in Chandralu had the potential for vast and permanent consequences in all six human kingdoms.

This last insight was a confirmation of what she had already suspected, the news she was bringing to Nicodemus being what it was. She prayed again to the Creator that the Council had been successful and that the forces of Dral and Lorn had been marshaled and dispatched to Ixos.

After sensing the sea deity, Francesca had risen from her bunk, unintentionally waking her student and cabin mate. She had hurried on deck to peer down into the starlit waters in hopes of spotting her future opponent. A kraken god perhaps? A whale goddess? Some divinity complex of human and marine animal? She wanted to glimpse at least some part of it. Maybe just a tentacle? But the divinity circled the boat only once more and swam with shocking speed north toward Chandralu.

Her student, the physician Ellen D'Valin, had followed her on deck and was soon joined by the twin druids, Tam and Kenna, both of Thorntree. Ellen had worn the haggard but alert expression of a physician called from her bed. The twin druids—their pale faces always so similar—blinked in the lingering confusion of sleep. The four of them comprised the entirety of Francesca's party—the smallest she had traveled with in years.

If Francesca had better control over her ability to transform into a dragon, she would have left them all behind and flown to Chandralu. But her incarnations were what they were, and so she had been forced to suffer another sea voyage. At least that had the advantage of keeping her in good company.

She had tried to send her party back to bed, but after hearing about the sea deity circling below, they insisted on staying with her.

She wondered what, exactly, they thought they could do for a dragon that she could not do for herself. For surely an attacking sea deity would induce her draconic incarnation. But there was no use pointing this out to her followers as it would only make them feel small and insignificant. Then, the next time she tried to send them out on a small and insignificant task, they would object on the grounds of smallness and insignificance.

Many years ago, remaining quiet had been a perennial problem for Francesca, but years of leadership had taught her the importance of shutting up. Well, mostly they had. Mostly.

So Francesca had stood with her party until the ship's bell had rung and the watch changed. She perceived the bell's sound as a lovely vivid red cloud to her right that faded into a quieter, quavering scintilla and then dissolved into silence.

Thirty-four years ago, when she and Nicodemus had been embroiled in the demon Typhon's usurpation of Avel, a half-dragon named the Savanna Walker had attacked her and permanently restructured her mind. The Savanna Walker was in fact the distorted remains of an ancient cacographer named James Berr. His touch had caused her ears to report their sensation to the part of her mind that perceived vision.

Initially this synesthetic perception of sound had made Francesca effectively deaf. But over time she had adapted to the peculiarities of her mind, learned to interpret sound as vision. Words were recognizable by their geometry and color, individual voices by their particular hues and shapes. Music, initially overwhelming almost hallucinogenic, had become a stream of color and light through time—sometimes pulsatile, sometimes free flowing—which was entirely indescribable to those with typical hearing. As a result, her tastes in poetry and song changed away from classical structure toward the novel and spontaneous. It had taken her decades, but Francesca had transformed what had been a debilitating difference into a unique way of apprehending and appreciating the universe.

Presently, Francesca's adaptation to her synesthetic hearing had become so expert that she experienced no anxiety about interpreting sound or communicating.

So after perceiving the ship's vivid red bell toll, Francesca had tried to keep her party out of the sailor's way. But when the first mate invited them to return to their cabins with less than perfect politeness, Francesca finally convinced the young people to sleep while they could.

They had left her alone with the night sky to think about the sea deity. That it had been subtle enough to hide its identity suggested it was not some newly incarnated neodemon. But no legitimate member of the Ixonian pantheon would have come so close without declaring itself. The realization had darkened her mood and left her grimacing into the wind.

Francesca contemplated how quickly the world was changing. Less than fifty years ago, all the magical societies from wizards to pyromancers were still meeting in convocations to ensure that no magical society would, at least overtly, participate in the wars between kingdoms. Now the empire openly filled its ranks with the hierophants, pyromancers, shamans, and the wizards of Astrophell. Meanwhile, the wizards of Starfall Keep, the druids, and the highsmiths were committed to fighting in any conflict that threatened a league kingdom.

These reflections further darkened Francesca's mood until the sun crested the eastern headlands. Then the tropical wind blew just cool enough to be pleasant. After a month of rolling decks and salt beef and hardtack, there was the promise of solid land underfoot and Ixonian curry in the belly. It was enough to lift her mood.

She turned toward the sunrise and felt the wind tossing her long brown hair. She looked north and saw the Cerulean Strait—a narrow stretch of water between the Chandralu peninsula and the northern headlands that connected the ocean with the Bay of Standing Islands. She could not yet make out any of the famous limestone islands as they were found only in the bay's eastern waters.

Decades ago Francesca had been written by the ancient demon Typhon and placed in the city of Avel in an attempt to convert Nicodemus. Together, she and Nico had escaped the demon's control and defeated him.

In creating Francesca, Typhon had given her memories of a physician who had studied in the clerical academy in Port Mercy and then practiced in the famous infirmary of Chandralu. As a result, Francesca had a wealth of personal and historical memories of the archipelago.

It had been a long time since she'd last visited. Ixos was now her daughter's domain—for better or worse—and her memories of the archipelago and its history had become intermingled with the guilt, longing, and anger that she felt whenever she thought of Leandra.

In fact, Francesca had lately come to see how well Ixos fit Leandra. For example, the Ixonian histories reported that the ancient Lotus People had built Sukrapor, their first and greatest city, on a wide limestone mantle where the Bay of Standing Islands now stood. Back then, there was no bay, only a narrow estuary where the Matrunda River met the sea. Sukrapor had thrived until the Sea People had ventured out of the inner island chain on voyaging canoes and catamarans. The wars between the two cultures had been savage.

The fiercest battles had been fought in the estuary; the Sea People's ancient gods had again and again smashed themselves into the rock mantel below Sukrapor, dissolving limestone from beneath the city into the hundreds of tall standing islands that lined the eastern aspect of the bay.

The Sea People would have been victorious if the ancient Lotus gods had not made a desperate alliance with the Cloud People of the outer island chain. Though few in number, the Cloud People possessed the earliest form of the hydromancer's magical language. When the first water temple was built and the nascent order of hydromancers had formed, the balance of power in the archipelago had evened.

The wars had raged for decades, weakening all combatants, and ended only when the First Neosolar Empire expanded out of Trillinion to subjugate the entire archipelago. Under imperial rule, the Lotus People had retreated up the Matrunda River to build Matrundapor. An age later, when the First Neosolar Empire had crumbled, one deity from each of the archipelago's cultures had fused themselves together to form the Trimuril, the first divinity complex. United under this deity, the three Ixonian peoples won independence as the kingdom of Ixos and founded Chandralu as their capital.

However, as was so often the case in history, strife among the cultures had continued. The ancient prejudices remained. Skirmishes and even small wars between Sea and Lotus, Cloud and Sea, Lotus and Cloud continued to the present day.

Francesca wondered again if this history wasn't the reason Leandra had chosen to dedicate her short life to the archipelago. The Lotus Culture, the Sea Culture, the Cloud Culture, all composed the body of Ixos. Each was now dependent on the others, and yet periodically at war with one another.

Ixos, the archipelago, was vibrantly alive and yet at war with itself, just as Leandra's body was intensely alive and yet at war with itself.

Thinking of her daughter's disease felt like a taste of ash to Francesca. She thought of all the patients she had cured. Francesca would have forsaken them all if it had allowed her to cure her daughter. Instead, she had only managed to turn her daughter's childhood into an endless series of examinations and experiments. During all those years, they had made only one discovery: During a disease flare, high doses of stress hormones could calm her body's attack on her textual aspects.

Until this discovery, Francesca had not thought that Leandra would live past her tenth year. Now, even though she took the stress hormones during her disease flares, it did not seem that Leandra would live past forty years, a very young age to die for someone of her heritage. So it was that Leandra was Francesca's most beautiful creation, her greatest failure.

Francesca thought about her other mistakes as a mother. At the time, there had seemed to be so little choice. So little choice, especially fourteen years ago in Port Mercy. Perhaps it was that night, that exact night, when she had lost her daughter.

“Magistra?”

Francesca turned to see that Ellen had come back up on deck. She was a petite woman, dark skin, deep-set brown eyes, short glossy black hair, wearing a grand wizard's black robes. It was good to see her. “Ellen, were you able to sleep at all?”

Ellen stepped beside her. “Slept like the dead, which always makes me happy.”

“Am I not letting you sleep enough?”

“No,” Ellen said while looking at the sea. “But since I enjoy sleeping like the dead, I assume it's evidence that I won't mind actually being dead.”