“Hear that wailing?” Deirdre asked. “He's touched those minds. They have thoughts but not words. It's called aphasia. You're beginning to feel it; you're slightly aphasic already. Now, unless we flee before he arrives, you may never speak a clear word again.”
“H-him?” Francesca stuttered at the bedside. “The demon?”
More voices joined the wailing and began to rise and fall in an eerie cacophony of call and answer.
“Not Typhon, another slave. One I wanted to trap with that anklet. But my agents on the street are as good as dead. The beast has never moved this fast before. Damn me! We must flee before he enters the infirmary.”
With difficulty, Francesca lifted Deirdre from the table. Her eyes could not focus. Deirdre wrapped her arms around Francesca's neck. The caterwauling rose into an ecstatic crescendo and then fell dead silent. The ground shook.
“Goddess, defend us,” Deirdre whispered, tightening her arms around Francesca. “He's here.”
Suddenly conscious, Shannon dropped the text he had been holding. It fell to the wooden floorboards and shattered.
Strange.
He frowned at the scattering golden runes and then yawned so powerfully his jaw cracked. Wincing, he rubbed his temples and wondered why he had awoken standing up and holding a spell. Even more disconcerting, he had no idea where he was.
Looking up revealed a circular room with white walls and rows of bookcases. Bright sunlight poured in through an arched window that looked out onto a small sunlit city.
Stranger still.
The city's many sandstone buildings huddled so tightly that in most places only alleys ran between them. Only a few wide streets were cobblestoned. Tall, crenellated walls divided the city into different districts. Everything was wet from a recent rain.
The closest districts boasted an abundance of gardensâsquares filled with flowering vines, walkways flanked by palms and cypress, tiled courtyards with leafy trees, almond and orange.
Farther districts were filled with dilapidated buildings and sprawling shacks. A portion of the farthest district seemed to have recently burned down.
Along the city's edge ran massive sandstone walls crowned with brassroofed watchtowers. Beyond the city, green savanna rolled away under a lacquer-blue sky.
All this indicated that Shannon was in a city of Western Spires. But which one?
It was too small for Dar. There was neither ocean nor steep mountains nearby, so it couldn't be Kara. Avel, then? The gardens and savanna suggested so.
But how in the Creator's name had he come here? He rubbed his eyes and tried to think straight. Thoughts moved through his mind with strange speed, as if he were dreaming.
The last thing he remembered was living a hermit's life in the Heaven Tree Valley hundreds of miles away in the Pinnacle Mountains. He had been training his pupil, who was named ⦠was named ⦠It was hard to remember. Did it start with an
n
?
He knew the boy's name, to be sure. But the memory of it was buried in his mind. His pupil's name was ⦠It was â¦
In the distance, voices began to wail. It was a quavering sound, haunting, not quite musical. Perhaps a chant? Shannon frowned. He was in a tall Spirish building filled with something that might be devotional song. A sanctuary?
Shannon nodded to himself. He had to be in either Avel's sanctuary or the infirmary built next to it. Either way he was in a building sacred to the city's ruler, the canonist Cala.
But what in the Creator's name was a canonist?
He had to think hard to find the memory: a deity could invest part of its soul into a human to create an avatar. But if a deity placed all of its soul into a human, the result was a canonist, a demigod more powerful than an avatar but weaker than a freely expressed deity. Only Spires had canonists because ⦠because the sky goddess Celeste maintained a list, a canon, that named all the demigods she allowed in Spires. She did that to ⦠Shannon knew it had something to do with the Spirish Civil War. Hadn't he fought in that war?
Another yawn popped Shannon's jaw. Exhaustion was making him stupid. Things would make more sense after a nap.
He turned, looking for a place to lie down, and was surprised to discover a large redwood door and table. On the table lay several cloth-bound books, the nearest of which had been splattered with red ink. A square of paper lay on its cover. Something had been written on it in black ink. Shannon leaned forward to read. It was difficult to make out. There was a red blotch on the paper, then the thin spidery words “our memories are in her” and another blotch. No punctuation or capitalization.
Despite his growing confusion, Shannon yawned once more and blinked. He examined the note again, and his breath caught. The blotches weren't stains of red ink.
They were bloodstains.
A thrill of fear ran through him. Remembering the dropped magical text, he looked at the floor for the rune sequences. They had been written in Numinous, a magical language that could alter light and other magical text. To those fluent in the language, Numinous runes shone with golden light.
The distant wailing was growing more insistent.
Despite his fear, Shannon's eyelids grew heavier as he examined the scrambled spell. It had broken into two heaps of rune sequences. He must have been holding two sentences, each of which had formed its own small mound.
Pieces from the larger pile had scattered farther, some disappearing under the door.
He turned to the smaller pile first and pushed the fragments into a line.
When translated, they would read:
gain eea 'red Youcans use beca you ead.
Another yawn. He shook his head and tried to focus. The period behind
ead
meant it should come last. The capitalization in
Youcans
indicated it should come first.
Youcans
lacked spaces and so would likely become
you can s
or maybe
you cans.
He paired this capitalized fragment with others that might follow.
Youcans'red?
No.
Youcansuse?
No.
Youcanseea
â
He froze.
Youcanseea?
He inserted three spaces:
You can see a
â¦
Shannon looked up again at the walls, the window, the city, the sky. “Creator, save me!” he whispered. “What's happened?”
Though some of Shannon's memories seemed hidden, he knew he was supposed to be blind. Decades ago, he had looked at a forbidden text; it had destroyed his mundane vision. Since that day, he had seen only through the eyes of his familiar, a parrot named Azure. But now he beheld the mundane world with his own eyes. How in the Creator's name was this possible?
He turned back to the runes and added the
gain, beca,
and
use
to the translation.
You can see again because
His fingers shook so badly he couldn't pick up the remaining sequences. But it didn't matter.
He already knew how the sentence would read. The last three fragmentsâ
you, 'red,
and
ead
âwere already in order.
You can see again because you're dead.
High up in Avel's sanctuary, Nicodemus crouched in a dark hallway and waited for the sound of footsteps. If this raid on Typhon's library was timed correctly, he would shatter the demon's mind as if it were a stained-glass window. For nearly ten years, Nicodemus had waged clandestine war against the demon. It was almost time to end that war.
But the attack had to be perfect. He needed to catch all three librarians together and unaware.
So he crouched in the dark and waited for footsteps.
None came.
Nicodemus checked the spells tattooed in violet and indigo runes across his arms and chest. He checked the grip of his hatchets. He looked back at his five kobold students. In the dark, only the skinspells on their inhumanly broad shoulders were visible. The party had one more man, farther away, keeping watch on their backs. Everyone held perfectly still.
It was almost time.
Abruptly the floorboards shook. A small earthquake. Not a concern. The demigoddess Cala, the city's canonist, had built her sanctuary and infirmary with her godspell. The buildings could withstand any earthquake that struck Western Spires.
From somewhere lower down, a few voices wailed. Likely something had tipped over or fallen off a shelf. Slowly the voices quieted.
But no footsteps sounded.
So Nicodemus closed his eyes and waited. It was almost time.
He hadn't always been so patient, so focused. Ten years ago in Starhaven, he had been Magister Shannon's anxious apprentice, a cacographer who misspelled most any text. When a creature named Fellwroth had begun murdering male cacographers, Nicodemus discovered that Typhon had arranged his birth to reconstruct an imperial bloodline of people capable of learning Language Prime, the language from which all living things were derived.
Typhon had stolen Nicodemus's ability to spell and placed it into the
Emerald of Aarahest. With this gem, the demon sought to spellwrite a dragon that could cross the ocean and reanimate the dread god Los.
With the help of an avatar named Deirdre, Nicodemus and Shannon had defeated Fellwroth. However, Typhon had taken possession of Deirdre and escaped with the emerald.
Nicodemus, Shannon, and the weakened goddess Boann had retreated to the Heaven Tree Valley, where Nicodemus learned that he was not disabled in the kobolds' languages. Convinced his struggle against Typhon was part of their prophecy, several kobolds had followed Nicodemus out of the valley to hunt Typhon.
Presently two of the kobolds behind Nicodemus tensed. Their hearing was inhumanly sharp. So Nicodemus leaned forward and strained his ears. There it was: a distant but steady plodding. Footsteps. The last of the three librarians was nearing the point of ambush. It was almost time.
The footsteps grew louder until they sounded not ten feet away. They stopped. Two men whispered in the manner peculiar to librarians. Then came the creaking of someone sitting in a chair.
It was time.
Nicodemus barked the attack command and broke into a dead sprint. In the next instant, he burst into Typhon's private library and threw a hatchet at the three men sitting before a table covered with loose sheets of paper.
The room was long, narrow, lined with bookcases. Several windows above the shelves let sunlight pour down through the mote-filled air.
Nicodemus's axe spun through beams of light before striking a librarian's shoulder. The man went down without a sound, but his neighbor rose and, with a cry, pulled a blaze of silver prose from his book and hurled it. Nicodemus sidestepped the extemporized attack.
The third librarian stood and stumbled backward. Several glass flasks were slung around his neck. He had to be an Ixonian hydromancer, a water mage. Nicodemus threw his second hatchet at the man, but his companion knocked the axe away with a silvery paragraph. Meanwhile the injured librarian rose from the ground, his left arm soaked with blood from the axe wound.
The floor shook more violently than before. A few books fell from their shelves. An aftershock. Behind Nicodemus, the shadows moved as if alive. Somewhere below, men began wailing again.
Nicodemus focused on the librarians. All three were disguised as devotees of the canonist Cala, wearing white linen shirts and blue longvests. As one, they looked up at the windows. They knew that the spells tattooed on
Nicodemus functioned only in darkness. Reassured, they looked back down.
With a snarl, one librarian cast a silvery plume of cutting prose. Nicodemus sprinted left, avoiding the lacerating words and hearing them cut into the hide-bound books behind him. Something glass shattered on the floor to his right and then detonated with enough force to knock him against the bookcase.
Somehow Nicodemus kept his balance and kept running. The distant wailing grew louder. He turned and saw the water mage cocking his hand back with another glass vial. The man must have charged the solution with aqueous runes to render it corrosive, poisonous, or explosive.
But before the man could hurl the linguistic concoction at Nicodemus, a beam of sunlight winked out. Then another. The librarians looked up to the windows.
Nicodemus's five kobold students, hidden under light-bending subtexts, had climbed the bookshelves. The sunlight had burned off their cloaking spells to reveal their dark blue skin and blond hair. As planned, the librarians had been too distracted by Nicodemus's attack to notice their ascent. Three more windows went black as the kobolds covered them with cloth.
The water mage pulled his arm back to throw his vial, but Nicodemus peeled a tattoo from his forearm and cast it with a flick. The indigo runes frayed in the half light, but the textual missile maintained enough coherence to strike the hydromancer's vial, detonating it and knocking all three librarians flat.
The last sunbeams disappeared, plunging the library into blackness. A kobold yawped in victory. Nicodemus recognized the voice. It was Vein, his eldest student.
One librarian cast a comet of silvery sentences toward the windows, but in the dark he aimed too high and the spell shattered against the ceiling and fell as a coruscation of pale sentence fragments. In the dark, the librarians were far outmatched.
Nicodemus allowed himself a moment of savage satisfaction and edited the spells tattooed around the keloid scar on the back of his neck.
Typhon had given him that scar when he placed part of Nicodemus's mind in the emerald. Unless shielded from each other, the scar and emerald communicated with each other as they tried to reunite. Back in Starhaven, the communication between scar and emerald had given him prophetic nightmares and inadvertently revealed his location to his enemies. Since fleeing the wizardly academy, Nicodemus had shielded his scar with sentences tattooed around it. Now, for the first time in years, he weakened the spells around the scar.
Suddenly he knew the emerald was at the other end of the library, just beyond a metal door that would open into Typhon's study. Through the emerald, Nicodemus sensed that the demon had deconstructed his mind for research. Nicodemus had planned this raid to coincide with both the lycanthrope attack and this brief hour of Typhon's vulnerability.
A faint light shone in the library. Nicodemus turned and saw the hydromancer had activated a vial of lucerin. The liquid glowed faintly blue. A second light began to shine: this one a thin, flickering flame. It seemed the spellwright that Nicodemus had hit with the hatchet was a Trillinonish pyromancer. Despite his wounds, the fire mage had cast a few flammable sentences in hopes of generating enough light to ward off the kobold's spells.
It was no matter. A dark objectâa hatchet or maybe simply a bookâstruck the vial of lucerin, shattering the glass and splattering the glowing liquid onto the floor. Another projectile snuffed the pyromancer's flame. Darkness was again complete, and Nicodemus's students were climbing down the bookshelves. Their skin blazed with sentences of violet and indigo.
A librarian called out for help, his voice quavering. But the man was a demon worshiper. This had to be done. The other two librarians began to yell. One begged for his life. The young kobold named Jasp replied with a murderous war cry.
Nicodemus turned away. In the next instant, all voices stopped. The demon worshipers had been silenced perhaps by a sentence, perhaps by a hatchet. It didn't matter.
Nicodemus walked toward the emerald until he stood in front of the study's large metal door. A demon and the missing part of himself lay on the other side. Once he brought this barrier down, a decade of fighting would be over. He raised his hand and was about to press on the door when the floorboards shook violently. Far below, many voices rose in a long, undulating cacophony.
A chill of recognition moved through Nicodemus. He cursed and listened again. The voices grew louder, began to rise and fall.
It was true then.
The wailing meant that the sanctuary was now reverberating with a force more dire than any earthquake.
Somehow the Savanna Walker had returned.
Nicodemus swore. He had thought it impossible. The lycanthrope attack should have kept both the Walker and the canonist occupied for hours.
Nicodemus put his hand against the door and felt a yard of protective spells. Hacking through it would take half an hour at least. No good. The
Walker was too close, and inside the sanctuary the beast would be too powerful to fight.
Nicodemus, his blood heated by shame and anger, rewrote the tattooed sentences around his scar, breaking communication between the two parts of himself.
Suddenly the raid was a failure. If the Walker caught them in the sanctuary, it would be a massacre. The building shook again and the wailing fell silent. Nicodemus turned and sprinted through the dark library. “Vein and Dross to me,” he called to his students. “The rest follow right behind. We run.”