Spellbreaker (28 page)

Nicodemus remembered the first time he had brought Leandra to the Floating City. She had been only six years old. The new order of the world had just begun forming. In Dral the rule of the forest prevailed, and the structure of clan and tribe that had shaped the divinities continued to govern them. The strong hunted the weak and a new divinity might be labeled a neodemon for nothing more than attracting the disapproval of a more powerful divinity. A phenomenal amount of divine text was destroyed.

In Lorn too, much divinity was wasted. Worship of any divinity but Argent, the kingdom's metallic oversoul, was forbidden unless the divinity had fused its soul into Argent's divinity complex. All deities with requisites falling outside conservative Lornish sensibilities were destroyed. Even more wasteful, to maintain his domination of the complex, Argent forbade any divinity to approach his power. Therefore, any seraph that attracted too many prayers was labeled a neodemon.

In contrast, Ixonian laws and customs were tolerant even though the trickster Trimuril's authority was unequivocal. By creating the Floating City, the Ixonians allowed an array of divinities to coexist while focusing their power. As a result the archipelago could call upon as much divine power as the other two league kingdoms combined.

When Nicodemus explained this in simpler terms to little Leandra, she stared at the Floating City and asked if that meant that Ixos would be less afraid of the empire. Nicodemus had known his daughter was precocious, but still the observation surprised him. And, indeed, four years later the Wars of the Ogun Blockade were won decisively by the Ixonians against the Trillinonish, whereas the Goldensward War that pitted Lorn against Spires was a disaster for the league.

His little girl had seen all that when she had frowned at the Floating City. Back then no one had thought Leandra would outlive her first decade. Thinking about the little girl he had known—her dark fierce eyes, the force with which she would scream when her disease flared up—filled Nicodemus again with dread.

At the end of the plaza stood six of the Trimuril's priests. Wordlessly, they surrounded Nicodemus's party and began the short walk down the steps to the crater lake.

Nicodemus tried to empty his mind and looked up toward their destination.

At the lake's center, amid the chaos of small craft, the Floating Palace twisted slowly around its anchor. As large as any compound in Chandralu, the Floating Palace consisted of three stories, each decorated with wooden beams lacquered bright red and upturned awnings trimmed with gold leaf.

When Nicodemus's entourage reached the water, they discovered that several priests had maneuvered four rafts into proximity so that his party could walk over one raft after another to a stretch of floating bridge that was currently connected to the palace.

Once on the floating bridge, the party resumed its formation. “You know…” Doria said while peering into the black depths of the crater lake, “we hydromancers cast enough text in this lake that if Lea and Fran do get to violence, we might be able to break any of their spells by just pushing them into the water.”

Above them the sky darkened as a cloud blew in from the sea. A sheet of warm rain swept across the lake. As one, the party picked up their pace. The hurrying worsened the confusion of Nicodemus's thoughts. He wondered what life would have been like if he were not a cacographic spellwright caught up in prophecy. What if he were a cattle herder or a cobbler or master of some other mundane profession in northern Spires where he had been born? Maybe it wouldn't matter. Maybe he'd make the same mistakes of ambition and desperation. Maybe his wife and daughter would still quarrel.

The rain intensified, and again the party sped up. The rain became hard, weighing down on them and spurring the party into a jog.

Nicodemus's thoughts coiled in on themselves. Did it matter that Leandra and Francesca had placed kingdoms between each other? Wouldn't it be just as painful if they had placed counties or villages between each other? So long as there was ill will, what did space matter?

He wondered if the doom hovering over his family came not from demons or empire or anything far away, but from within himself. He had the strange sensation that he had changed who he was so many times—cripple, killer, lover, husband, father, warden—and yet this doom had changed with him. Maybe this doom had been part of him, had been separated from him when he was young and was now inexorably making its way back to him.

As a younger man, Nicodemus had thought of life as a presence, like a candle flame that had been lit and would eventually burn out. But with every passing year, he developed a stronger premonition that life was a separation. Before he was born, he had been a complete void; then something had happened that split his birth from his death and flung them far apart; now they were slowly drawing closer together, and though he could twist and turn, baffle their fall toward each other, one day his demise would reunite with his conception, a circle would add a degree to the three hundred fifty-nine already drawn, and he would return to void. Nothing sad about it.

The rain intensified yet again as the party reached the eaves of the Floating Palace. One by one they jumped from the floating bridge to the palace steps. Two priests waited for them at the palace's wide doors. Nicodemus climbed the steps while the others tried to dry their clothes.

“My Lord Warden,” one of the priests said while pressing his palms together over his heart. “The Sacred Regent is expecting you. There should be a reception within the hour. We are preparing quarters for you in case you should spend the night. In the meantime, would you like to dry off and change your clothes?”

When Nicodemus said that he would, the priest led him up a flight of stairs to a small room on the second story. Diaphanous curtains covered wide windows looking onto the lake. The clouds had darkened the day and Nicodemus could see that the rain was driving another party to rush along the floating bridge toward the palace. He heard a screen door sliding behind him and turned to see a young priest bringing in dry clothes and a towel. Nicodemus found he was shivering slightly, though from the wet or his nerves he could not say.

He thanked the priest, who put the clothes and towel down before withdrawing. From the floor below sounded the racket of the new party arriving in the palace. Nicodemus gratefully peeled off his longvest and shirt and then picked up the dry towel and pressed it to his face. It was cotton, likely from Trillinion, rough against his skin but with the smell of clean laundry. Looking over the clothes, Nicodemus saw that the priest had brought him a Spirish-style white silk blouse, linen pants, and a beautiful deep green longvest. It pleased him that the palace servants had remembered his preferences.

Nicodemus was just about to finish undressing when he heard the door move. “I'm not—” he started to say but the screen slid away to reveal a tall, lithe woman, her long brown hair wet and plastered against her face and shoulders. She wore a wizard's black robes and a red physician's stole. The rain made the cloth cling to her hips, her slight breasts. She hadn't aged a day since he first saw her, could not age a day. The tropical sun had darkened the spray of freckles across her fair cheeks. Her mouth was parted slightly and her very dark brown eyes stared at him with what he was sure was a mirror of his own desire. It had been almost a year.

“Francesca,” he breathed and dropped the towel.

A few steps from the door, he caught her up in his arms and spun her around as she pressed her lips hard into his. She was the heat in his blood, a drug that evaporated all his solid thoughts of death into vapor.

He spun her around again and her feet struck the screen and sent him tottering back. She laughed as he landed her on her feet.

They were fumbling with her clothes now, tossing her stole to the ground and working with clumsy fingers at her collar fastenings.

“But the regent,” he said. “We can't—”

“I have to get out of these wet clothes anyway.”

“Good point.”

“Nico,” she whispered as they continued to work at the fastenings, “I'm bringing horrible news from Dral.”

“Later,” he whispered before pressing in for another urgent kiss and then, “The door.”

She turned and with a flick of a wrist sent a silvery paragraph across the room to push the screen door shut. The loud clap made Nicodemus aware that he could hear more people moving around on the floor below. He thought perhaps he heard footsteps and turned to the door.

But then Francesca undid the ties around her collar, drew her robes up over her head and tossed them aside.

“Fran,” he said, “someone—”

“Later,” she whispered while pressing herself against his chest. Her warmth scattered his wits. He wrapped his arms around her and saw how his dark skin made hers seem fairer. They kissed again and—

Someone walked in the hallway with deliberately heavy tread. Reflexively, Nicodemus put himself between the door and his wife.

A woman cleared her throat. “Magistra, I hope you'll pardon the most regretted interruption.”

“Yes, Ellen?” Fran asked.

“Another party has come to the palace. It's your daughter.”

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Kneeling in the throne room, Nicodemus looked up at a hundred-ton whale floating an inch above his head. Or he listened to a spider whisper in his ear. Or he straddled the muscular, musky back of an elephant marching rhythmically around the Floating Palace. Or, and more likely, he did none of these things.

Trickster deities always gave Nicodemus a headache.

“Divine Trimuril,” Nicodemus said, hiding the annoyance, “might I have a moment? Your godspells are…” His perceptions flickered. The whale thrashed. The spider nattered. “A moment…” The elephant reared. Groaning, Nicodemus placed both his hands on the floorboards to steady himself.

Leandra had just finished reporting that thugs were attacking minor city deities. Now the Trimuril was trying to communicate directly with Nicodemus and so was unintentionally baffling his perceptions. To almost any other soul, the Trimuril projected herself as one aspect of her trinity. However, Nicodemus's cacography partially misspelled the Trimuril's texts, and so her godspells had an imprecise and often prismatic effect upon him.

Most people thought of tricksters as mischief-makers: clever pranksters, rapacious thieves, clownish dupes. Most would say tricksters were rule-breakers. But in Nicodemus's experience tricksters did not break rules so much as they showed rules to be broken.

Often humans prayed to tricksters for help escaping from dire situations, laws, customs. Tricksters facilitated such escapes by altering perceptions. They might, for example, play the idiot who commits misdeeds to demonstrate the folly of such misdeeds and so—reinforced with perception-altering godspells—reshape the values of a village, city, kingdom. Or they might humiliate another god to change how the god was worshiped. Tricksters were the deities of altered moral perception.

Nicodemus felt his perceptions reel again through the Trimuril's incarnations. He tried to glean unaltered reality by concentrating on what he knew about the Trimuril.

Centuries ago, when the archipelago sought to escape the First Neosolar Empire, each island culture incarnated a different trickster. Oka'pahui, a blue whale navigator goddess, helped Sea People smugglers befuddle the imperial fleets. Elephantine Ghajal had built secret jungle roads for Lotus Culture warriors. Araxa, the Ancestor Spider, taught the Cloud People how to forge and spy. The first Ixonian king had negotiated the fusion of these deities, and the resulting complex had tricked all of the archipelago's pantheons into uniting against the empire.

By focusing on these thoughts, Nicodemus's perceptions consolidated. Gone were the whale, spider, elephant. He knelt in a wide wooden throne room, a row of arched windows behind the dais. To his right knelt his wife, to his left his daughter. They were both looking at him with concerned expressions so similar it made his heart ache. Neither mother nor daughter had looked at or spoken to the other.

Behind Nicodemus sat Doria, Sir Claude, and Rory. To their left sat Leandra's divinities; to their right, Francesca's student Ellen. Presently Rory cocked his head, whispering to Ellen. At the back of the room sat a small crowd of Ixonian dignitaries and deities. Notable in the crowd was Tagrana, the archipelago's most powerful war deity. Her tiger-eyes studied Nicodemus, and a brilliant aura leapt about her muscular body like flames.

In front of Nicodemus stood a dais and a simple wooden throne. Upon it sat the Sacred Regent, who ruled Ixos in the name of an ancient royal family, long ago made figureheads and confined to a temple city on Mount Ixram. The present Sacred Regent was a thin, dark-skinned man well past his first century with lank white hair and blank white eyes. Nicodemus had never learned his given name—which was taboo to mention—but knew that before his elevation, the Sacred Regent had been the head of the hydromantic order. Presently, the regent wore sumptuous robes of yellow silk and an expression of grave consideration.

Beside him stood a short androgynous figure with limestone skin, a slight potbelly, six arms, a shaved head, wide stone eyes, and a slight smile indicating an emotion beyond human conjecture. This was the Trimuril's true incarnation.

“My apologies, Divine Trimuril,” Nicodemus said. “I am ready.”

The stony incarnation waved one of six hands to dismiss the comment. The divinity moved with irregular, insectlike jerks. “There is no need to apologize.” The Trimuril's lips did not move; rather the words came from a thin, screechy voice as if Ancestor Spider's incarnation were sitting on Nicodemus's shoulder and whining in his ear. “I wondered if we might play a game. It would be fun.”

With twitchy movements, the Trimuril flatted all six of her palms toward the sky in a gesture of offering. To govern her diverse pantheon, the Trimuril constantly sent her soul into various ark stones to cause her incarnation to appear to the deities she judged to need guidance. She did this with incomprehensible speed. The small pauses in her twitching movement indicated those brief moments when she would send her soul somewhere else on the lake. The fact that she had manifested her soul in her physical incarnation for so long indicated how important she felt the present audience was.