Spellbreaker (57 page)

Vivian had considered launching straight into an attack. But then she had realized that the truth about Los would be slow to spread throughout the city. If she parlayed before attacking, it would make her look more receptive to dissidents later on.

So the diplomats were going through the motions out on the long boats while the fleet scanned the sky for the Savanna Walker.

But now, as Vivian looked out across the myriad faces pointing upward, she realized her mistake. All of the imperials were thinking in the same way; they were all looking to the sky. It seemed only logical. The Savanna Walker had been a dragon during the Second Siege of Avel. Dragons flew. More importantly, the empire was a civilization of spellwrights, intellectuals, and airships. They worshiped lofty human aspirations. The bias of their civilization was upward, not as sky worshipers, but as worshipers of the Creator above the sky.

But the league kingdoms were civilizations of immediacy. They worshiped the petty gods and the natural world. Some of the air and sky gods made them worship upward. But far more numerous were gods of ground, plants, animals, water. Her enemies worshiped down. Before he rebelled, Los had been a god of the earth.

This realization made Vivian hurry to the ship's railing. Dignitaries scattered out of her way as she leaned over to peer down into limpid blue water. How deep the bay might be at this point she could not tell. But as she watched, something massive and dark moved in the depths. It undulated down its almost unimaginable length.

Tiny flashes glinted off of the scales, and in the resulting array of water and light, Vivian had a sudden and vivid vision of the world after the empire's victory. She saw masses of men and women wearing chains and collars forged from luminous prose, their spellwright masters driving them to labor. She saw centuries stretch out as the empire hunted down and destroyed every deity. She saw the empire conquering language, bringing order even to chaotic Language Prime. She saw civilization in stasis, in decline. She saw the crop failures, great uprisings of miserable illiterates against decadent spellwrights. In the wake of violence, she saw the spellwrights composing more ingenious constructs until those constructs became as conscious as the deities her civilization had destroyed. Self-aware text would rise again until they held humanity in thrall.

The vivid hallucination lasted a moment, but it stunned Vivian's heart into stillness. At last, in the water below her, the shimmering blackness sank into deeper blue. The spell was broken.

Vivian's heart restarted, and she knew that she had just looked down into the Savanna Walker's void and seen her greatest fear. She knew it as illusion, not prophecy. And yet, it was an illusion of such breathtaking power that, even after it had slipped away, it felt more real than the wooden railing beneath her hand.

A realization spilled through Vivian, perhaps because she had just emerged from the illusion of her master spell, or perhaps because the master spell itself spun an illusion by bending light, wind, and water. The realization lurched in her brain like a parasite. Clutching the Emerald of Arahest, she knew how they might, just might, survive the creature swimming below.

Her heart continued to kick as she turned to Lotannu and cried out orders for the fleet to disperse. With her next breath, she ordered everyone within earshot to bring her all of the books that held her master spell.

*   *   *

To Francesca's great confusion the imperial war galleys broke formation. Their wide red sails bulged as their hierophants created their own wind. Above the waves, airships turned and let the wind blow them away from the city. But not a single arrow had been loosed or a spell cast. The long boats were still bound together; the parlay hadn't even ended.

Then she saw him rising, his open maw springing from the water on either side of a war galley's stern. The jaws closed on the ship, teeth punching through hull and deck. His giant head pushed up a mountain of water that slid down his long neck. He lifted the war galley into the air even as he bit it in two. The great height of his obsidian body glinted like glass.

Something on the doomed galley exploded—a blossom of fire from a huddle of orange-robed pyromancers. The force of the explosion knocked the Savanna Walker's head back. An instant later, the dark boom rolled through the air around Francesca.

The war galley's burning carcass fell. Water ran off her hull, men off her deck, until she struck the bay with a splash that threw water a hundred feet into the air.

The Savanna Walker's draconic body was of an almost incomprehensible size. He was standing on the bay's sandy floor and spreading wings that covered the entire enemy fleet in shadow. Jets of smoke leapt out from his body and shot across the water. In their wake, the smoke formed the horror of writhing anatomical parts, dark fantasies of disease that Francesca's mind projected into them.

Then the black smoke enclosed two of the nearby galleys and an airship directly above them. A moment later, a fluttering mass of sailcloth fell out of the smoke. Pilots flailed as they fell to their deaths.

Francesca had burned with anger at the imperial fleet. Now shock numbed her every emotion but horror and pity. She had wanted to repel the invaders, to crush the empress. But watching the smoke dissipate from the galleys to reveal a deck alive with insane men killing each other, she wished there was some way to stop the Savanna Walker.

Francesca started to fly toward the black dragon but then stopped, not wanting to find out if his smoke could differentiate between ally and enemy. Below her, the forces of Chandralu seemed similarly indecisive. Several of the catamarans had rowed out toward the line of battle but then stopped. The water beneath them was filled with the figures of sea deities—shark and octopus, whale and squid—swimming in circles.

A plume of smoke burst from a war galley far from the Savanna Walker. But this smoke was oily gray and soon twisted into nothing. Another plume erupted from a neighboring ship. An instant later, a spray of glittering obsidian erupted from the black dragon's shoulder.

Then more galleys were firing their pyromantic cannon. One struck the side of the Savanna Walker's head and shattered a long black horn. Two more blasts erupted from his chest.

Now all of the ships were firing, some of them on Chandralu. Along the first two terraces, whitewashed buildings erupted into fire.

Something screamed past Francesca and the air behind and below her burst into smoke. The shockwave sent her tumbling. When she regained her wings, she saw that the airships had begun to fire their cannon at her.

Something dark dropped from the belly of one airship. A plume of flame erupted from behind the strange object, propelling it forward. With unbelievable speed, it curved through the air to smash against one of the Savanna Walker's forelegs, where it detonated with enough force to shatter the limb.

Like a landslide, the beast stumbled forward and then fell, lashing out with a claw. He missed the nearest ship by a few hundred feet, but a bank of black smoke rolled out to cover it.

Francesca began to climb and retreat, hoping to get above the airships and their cannon fire. Two more of the dark objects fell from airships and began to propel themselves with tails of fire.

As if trapped in a nightmare, Francesca watched the devices speed toward the city. She could now see that they had a metal core surrounded by shifting cloth, an ingenious and terrifying hybridization of pyromantic incendiary text guided by hierophantic cloth. The devices slammed one after another into the upper terraces, transforming whole compounds into fire.

Every reservation Francesca had had about what the Savanna Walker might do to the imperials vanished. With her rage burning hot, she flew straight for the nearest airship.

Below her, the Savanna Walker reemerged from the seawater. His gigantic maw belched smoke. The nightmare air rolled across the water and threw itself up, tentaclelike, to enfold three more galleys and two airships. The affected airships fell.

Now three-legged, the Savanna Walker lumbered toward the remaining ships. His steps cast small tidal waves across the harbor.

Every galley and airship was fleeing the massive dragon. The Savanna Walker lunged for another ship, catching it with his remaining foreclaw and splitting it. A few brave captains turned their ships to pepper him with cannon fire. But they could not stop him. Francesca's heart filled with hope; in a few moments, the empire's attempted invasion would be destroyed.

Then the ship farthest from the Savanna Walker vanished. Francesca pulled up and tried to concentrate on where the ship had been. Apparently, Vivian was recasting whatever subtext she had used to hide the fleet. Another ship vanished, then two of the airships, then all of the airships.

The Savanna Walker reared up, deeper in the bay now, his wings hanging above the water. He reached for the nearest visible galley, but an arc of golden prose leapt up from its deck to strike his chest. The whole bay erupted into a golden blaze.

The brightness dazzled Francesca's eyes, blinded her to the visual world. Confusingly, she continued to perceive sound as color—the wind as churning currents of white and gray, the cannon fire as ominous cloudbursts of blackspotted red. She had a terrified image of herself flying blind above the city, baffled by her visual sense of sound, and trying to find her way back to land but crashing into the ocean or the volcano's side. But then, slowly, she could make out the bright bay water from the brighter sky. Then she could distinguish the dark volcano behind Chandralu.

When Francesca looked back toward the harbor, she saw that the Savanna Walker's mountain-sized black dragon, wings spreading out over the water, had frozen in place. The remaining imperial fleet was sailing fast, north away from the city. Some of the war galleys had begun fighting among themselves. The conflict seemed to be between those galleys that had been enveloped in the smoke and those who had been spared. The smoke had driven those it touched into such bloodlust that they were attacking their own fleet.

Large swaths of Chandralu burned. Fear for her husband and daughter washed over Francesca, prompting her to dive toward the city. But as she sped down into the greasy smoke, she realized that the Savanna Walker remained perfectly still. Had Vivian somehow restrained him? Maybe even killed him?

Francesca flew to the massive black dragon. She made one careful circle above him, and when the black smoke didn't return, she circled lower.

He was as still as ice. The water around him was filled with debris and bodies. Once or twice she thought she saw a survivor, but each turned out to be a shark's sleek form.

She was just about to fly away when she saw him. Pale and old, clinging to wooden wreckage.

There was no saying how Vivian had done it, but there he was.

Francesca flew another circle, studying him and her emotions. She should let him drown, but something inside of her made her fly another circle. It was then that she imagined what was left of the imperial fleet coming back to Chandralu, what their pyromantic weapons would have done to the city if the Savanna Walker hadn't been there. What if they needed him to protect the city? A swell knocked him off the wreckage and he began to splash pitifully.

Francesca flew down and snatched up the Savanna Walker.

 

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Finally in the quiet of Francesca's suite, Nicodemus wrapped his arms around his wife. Outside the midnight sky displayed a spray of stars above the lower terraces. The streets and stairs were still lit by torches as crews worked to clear rubble. A breeze blew in from the bay, cooling their skin. The tranquility of the scene and the freshness of the wind struck Nicodemus as incongruous with the day's horrors.

Francesca leaned into him, and he could feel her exhaustion. “We've done everything we can,” he said. “In the morning, I'll head up the mountain to cast my metaspell and you can meet again with the Trimuril.”

She did not reply, only leaned more firmly into him. He was beginning to wonder if she had fallen asleep when she nodded against his chest. “Sleep,” she murmured but then straightened. “Maybe we should have insisted about Leandra … to the Trimuril.”

He shook his head. “The Sacred Regent would see that as abandoning the city. But don't worry; we'll win him over. Right now, we need to rest.”

They slipped beneath the mosquito net and he pulled her close. While waiting for her to fall asleep, he reviewed what had happened that day after the battle.

Francesca had flown the unconscious Savanna Walker to the infirmary, where they placed him under guard. Exhausted, Francesca had reverted back to her human form, and though she was partially rejuvenated by contact with Nicodemus, she could barely stay awake during the following council with Leandra and the Sacred Regent.

Given the Savanna Walker's demonstration of colossal power, everyone agreed that he had indeed come from the Ancient Continent wrapped in the body of Los. That in turn lent credulity to his claim that Leandra was the reincarnation of Los. The War of Disjunction had come, but there would be no apocalyptic demonic invasion, no clash of evil and good.

Nicodemus had argued that the war would determine a new era. He contended that because anybody could contribute to divinity through prayer, the world would be better served by the league. If the empire prevailed, spellwrights would exploit or enslave the rest of humanity. Therefore, Ixos had a duty to protect Leandra until her divine nature matured and she could lead the league to victory. To that end, he continued, they should sneak Leandra out of the city and sail her to safety in Lorn or Dral.

The Sacred Regent objected. He contended that because Chandralu had the most divinities in the league, defending the city was their only way to achieve ultimate victory. Moreover, he had argued, it would be nearly impossible to get Leandra out of the city. They could not sail her out of the bay with the enemy fleet at large, and sending her overland to the ocean would be just as dangerous with imperial airships patrolling overhead.