Spellbreaker (19 page)

Instead, and to his complete incomprehension, he discovered three young men, all dressed in drab lungi and standing over a large spread of cloth. They were working their hands frantically. Toward one end the sheets were bloodstained. Just beyond this lay a villager's burnt corpse.

On the other side of the sheet, a young woman squatted. Her left arm was filled with a wide codex and her right arm moved frantically upon the pages.

Suddenly things clicked into place for Nicodemus. “Rory!” he blurted. “Get back! The town wasn't attacked by a neodemon.”

Rory looked at him in confusion and had just enough time to say “It wasn't?” before the sheet below him leapt up and, with an edge as sharp as any razor, lunged for his throat.

 

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

In Chandralu, the definitive metric of civic power was the compound. Guilds, temples, powerful families, merchant cartels, the army, the navy, the judiciary, or any other organization desiring legitimacy had to maintain a compound to conduct daily affairs and house those pledged to its success. Only the poorest families maintained independent households.

The heart of any compound was its pavilion—a round central building containing a shrine to the Trimuril and abutting smaller, usually residential, buildings.

The humblest compounds consisted of a single-story pavilion and a lone house. Larger compounds included multistory pavilions and labyrinthine buildings that spanned several terraces and boasted lily gardens, small orchards, private bathing pools of blue crater water. The grandest compounds had their own carpenters, blacksmiths, weavers, and even small markets.

The Sacred Regent had granted Leandra a modest compound in the outer Utrana district. A two-story pavilion connected to residential buildings spanning two terraces.

When a still grumbling Leandra led Dhrun and Holokai up to her compound's only gatehouse on Utrana Way, she found a single guard was sitting just inside the iron bars. The other servants called him Old Mykos even though he wasn't much over forty and still possessed a full head of shaggy black hair and the muscular thick arms of the wrestler he had once been.

“Did you keep the place safe while I was gone, Mykos?” Leandra asked as the guard unlocked the gate.

Shrugging, Mykos pressed his palms together and then split them apart—a common Cloud Culture gesture to lament the world's shortcomings. “What can I say, my Lady Warden, the compound was beset by a troop of monkeys. It was left to poor Old Mykos to fight them off. You'd think the other guards would have helped…” Another shrug. “What can you do?”

Leandra smiled as she walked through the guardhouse into the pavilion. “However did you fight them off?”

“I threatened to go get my wife.”

“Harsh.”

“Ten of them dropped dead of fright,” Mykos said as he followed the party. “Shall I inform Vhivek that you are returned?” As chamberlain, Vhivek—an exceedingly polite old Lotus man—supervised the compound's daily operation.

“Please don't or Vhivek will try to serve me some extravagant meal,” Leandra said. “We won't be staying long. Oh, and Mykos, have my lord father or my lady mother arrived?”

The guard raised a bushy eyebrow. “No and no. I did not know we were expecting the Lady Warden of Dral.”

“It seems that we are, joyously. Do you know if Roslyn is in the compound?”

“Yes, my lady. Where else would the dear be?”

“Thank you, Mykos. Please don't admit anyone while I am in the compound.”

He nodded and turned back to the gatehouse.

Though not grand, Leandra's pavilion was a pleasant space. Twenty feet above, an unadorned dome opened at regular intervals to form skylights that let rectangular beams of sunlight stream down among wooden pillars. A walkway made a circuit around the second story and provided access to the various houses connected to the pavilion. In the center of the pavilion's ground floor lay a small reflecting pool. Behind it stood a stylized painting of a red lotus below a bulging white cloud, both limned with gold leaf. Here was the obligatory shrine to the Trimuril, the high divinity complex of the Kingdom of Ixos. It was also a representation of the Trinity Mandate: the oldest and most fundamental law of Ixos, which required every official building and endeavor to have a representation—and ideally a representative—of all three cultures.

Tradition required a prayer to the Trimuril after returning from a sea journey. However, given her recent disease flare, Leandra excused herself. “Kai, you may go to the kitchens, but don't gorge yourself,” Leandra said while mounting the wooden stairway that spiraled around the pavilion walls and led up to the second story.

Wordlessly Holokai headed off toward the kitchen, his expression one of pained concentration. “And don't pester the cooks!” she called after him.

“May I visit the arena?” Dhrun asked from her side.

“Only if you can be back in half an hour,” Leandra answered more sharply than she intended. They had reached the top of the stairs and were making their way around the walkway, the beams groaning under the divinity complex's considerable weight.

Dhrun did not answer, but Leandra would have bet her last rupee that he was making his infuriatingly half smile that might signify obedient contentment or silently amused judgment.

“Wait here,” she said and turned down a hallway and then climbed another flight of stairs to a building that stood on the terrace above. She stopped at the last door on the right. After a deep breath, Leandra took down her headdress, pushed the door open, and stepped into a small but bright room. There was a small four-poster bed in one corner, draped with a thin mosquito net. A wide window opened east, looking out at the bright city descending to the azure bay. A cloud was passing overhead putting the Lower Banyan Districts into shadow. A few drops of rain landed on the windowsill.

Before the window, wrapped in a shawl despite the tropical heat, was thin Roslyn. A small table stood beside her chair, a plate of mostly untouched rice and curry sitting upon it.

“Rosie?” Leandra asked.

Roslyn of the Amber Wood blinked. She had always been a small woman, barely over five feet and as slender as a young palm. But age had stooped her a few inches and stolen away pounds she could barely afford to lose.

“Rosie?” Leandra said loudly. The elderly woman blinked then looked up at Leandra. It was hard to believe that this skeletal face was the same that had given her the vivid smiles and the reprimanding frowns of a childhood nurse.

“Lady Francesca,” Rosyln said. “You've come to visit.”

“It's Leandra, Rosie,” she said loudly. “Not Francesca.”

“What?” Her watery blue eyes were searching Leandra's face.

“I'm your little Lea, Rosie,” Leandra nearly shouted. “I've played a trick on you and grew up.”

“You did?”

“I did.” Leandra had forgotten how hard it was to continue talking this loudly.

“Why … so you did. That's wonderful. How old are you, dear?”

“Thirty-three.”

“Thirty-three! Sacred Mother Forest! Why that's wonderful. Everyone said you wouldn't see fifteen.”

“I always hated doing what others told me.”

“You certainly did. Do you remember when I told you to finish your reading in your room … and you snuck out the window and your father found you with the handsome merchant's son? Do you remember?”

“I try not to.”

“What?”

“Rosie, they have lunch for you here.” She picked up the plate of curry.

She looked at the food in surprise. “Oh, I'm not hungry.”

Leandra lifted a forkful of rice. “But you'll have a bite for me, won't you?”

Roslyn eyed the fork uneasily. “Maybe later. Lea, my dear, are you married?”

“You know I wouldn't want to torture some poor man by marrying him.”

Roselyn chuckled. “No, no. Just waiting for a man that deserves you, and my, but it will take a long string of winters to find him.”

When Leandra was sixteen years old, her mother had somehow talked her into enrolling in the academy of Port Mercy, where she had started a physician's training. Well, one might call it “training,” if skipping her lectures and shirking infirmary duty could be called training. Nevertheless, in those two years, Leandra had seen enough senility to know that it came in a spectrum ranging from confusion to inconsolable sadness to delirious anger. Though she hated herself just a little bit more for it, Leandra was grateful that time was going to kill Roslyn by flattening her mind into childlike pleasantness rather than by any of its other, crueler methods.

The Creator knew that Leandra's disease was going to make her own death far more horrible than the one that was sitting before her, blinking rheumy eyes out a sunlit window.

Regardless, Leandra had the answer she had come for; there could be no reason why she should have to murder this old woman whose mind and spirit had all but passed out of this life.

“I love you, Rosie,” she said at normal volume, knowing that the old woman couldn't hear her. It was a cowardly thing. She should yell it. But instead she kissed the old woman on the cheek and said her goodbyes.

 

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Rory, get back!” Nicodemus bellowed.

Ahead of him, the druid stood above a sheet lunging for his throat. On the other side of the cloth, three young men worked their hands in complex patterns.

Suddenly, Nicodemus understood the ruins of Feather Island. Not a stitch of cloth remained in the village, and the hierophants' magical language was written upon cloth. The slash wounds on the villagers might come from spell-stiffened cloth rather than steel. The villagers hadn't been attacked by neodemons; they had been attacked by, “Wind mages!” Nicodemus yelled.

Rory danced back and brought up his quarterstaff. Where druidic wood met hierophantic cloth, white light blazed. Heat burned across Nicodemus's face and the cloth went slack. Two more strips of cloth billowed up and lunged for the druid.

Nicodemus jumped forward and grabbed one of the cloth spells. Sending a jolt of cacographic force down the sheet, he misspelled the text within. Beyond the sheets, the hierophants yelled. Beside them, the young woman with the book worked her hands more frantically across the pages.

Questions blazed into Nicodemus's mind. Hierophants were the spellwrights of Spires. They created the empire's airships and provided their fleets with sails that could generate their own wind. Many hierophants came to Ixos as members of imperial trading missions. But why should they have ransacked and destroyed a poor sea village? It didn't make any sense.

A strip of white cloth shot across the room and thrust a sharpened point into Nicodemus's left side. He felt something sharp punch through his leather longvest and into his skin. With a cry he stumbled back and grabbed hold of the eel-like cloth, dispelling it. But apparently the hierophants had learned; this sheet wasn't connected to the rest of the cloth and so he could not misspell any more of their texts.

Rory let out a war cry. His quarterstaff had elongated and shaped itself into smooth wooden blades. With expert dexterity, he spun the staff around, slashing apart the strips of magical cloth snaking around him. The druid's lacquered armor had come alive to cover every aspect of his body. The plates about his shoulders had folded around his head and formed a stag's antlers.

The druid ran into the fray, slashing through cloth and trying to reach the hierophants.

“Rory, fall back!” Nicodemus shouted. “Wait for the others!” Nicodemus took another step toward the door, but then remembered that not all of the villagers had suffered cutting wounds. Most of them had been burned.

Nicodemus looked at the woman flipping through the large book. If the others were imperial hierophants, than she might just be an imperial “Pyromancer!” Nicodemus yelled just as the woman reached into a page and pulled back an arc of dazzling white light.

Nicodemus sprinted out of the room. Behind him, he caught a glimpse of Rory rewriting his staff and armor into liquid wood that formed a blast shield. Nicodemus threw himself onto the boardwalk, landing painfully on one side. He had just enough time to grab one of the boards before the shockwave hit. A brain-rattling force jolted through him. Scalding heat ran along his exposed arms.

Nicodemus opened his eyes, half expecting to find that the blast had knocked him off the walkway to his death on the rocks below. But, thank the Creator, he saw his raw knuckles still tightened around the boards. To his right, he could see that the boardwalk had been scorched by the heat, a small flame dancing from the wood.

“Rory?” Nicodemus yelled. He rolled over, tried to stand, and to his nearly overpowering relief, found Doria and Sir Claude standing above him. Both were breathing hard from the run.

“It's the empire!” he croaked. “Three hierophants and a pyromancer. I don't know how much text they have left. Rory's in there.”

Sir Claude stepped forward. “Rory?”

Doria caught his shoulder. “Wait!” she barked with undeniable authority as she unslung the water skin from her back. She tossed the water skin through the doorway from which the flames had come. A moment later there was a loud pop and then a fine mist rolled out of the doorway. These droplets would contain potent amounts of the hydromancer's disspells. There were few spellwrights better able to neutralize hostile text than hydromancers. In a moment the mist fell. “Now, Sir Claude!” Doria yelled and gave the knight a shove.

Swords of fluid metal grew from both of the knight's hands as he charged into the room.

“We need one of them alive,” Nicodemus said. “At least one for questioning.”

Doria pulled a vial filled with rusty red liquid from her bandoleer and made for the doorway. There was another bang. Shouting. Carefully, Nicodemus struggled to his feet. Inside he found Rory on his knees, alive and trying to regain his feet. One the hierophants lay next to him, impaled by what seemed to be Rory's quarterstaff made into a spear.