The warkite was written on an eight-foot-long strip of white sailcloth. It possessed a small pair of triangular forewings and a larger pair of aft wings. Occasionally these flapped to provide direction or thrust, but mostly the construct moved by undulation. Though it flew through the air, the spell reminded Shannon of a shark swimming through the sea.
Originally, warkites had been written for battle, but since the Spirish Civil War, their only official function had been to guard Spirish holy places. Judging by its velocity, this particular warkite had identified Shannon-the-ghost as a foreign spell threatening the sanctuary.
With a lash of its tail, the kite dove through a hallway window and unfolded two cloth limbs; from each limb extended four talons made of sharpened steel squares.
Shannon leapt backward. Weighing almost nothing, he moved in a blur of speed. The warkite's talons struck the floorboards with a thump. One slashed Shannon's shin. Ghost or no, the pain lanced up his leg.
He flew about ten feet down the hall and landed awkwardly. The force of the warkite's strike made it crumple into a pile of sailcloth. Shannon looked at his shin and saw frayed sentences floating from the wound. He grabbed the injured language and edited it back into his body.
Plain steel would have passed straight through him. The talons must have encased cloth that contained sharp hierophantic spells.
Shannon looked up. The once-crumpled warkite was now bulging with air. The construct's fluttering edges luffed as it turned toward him.
Shannon crouched.
The warkite blasted air against the floor and pounced. Shannon dodged left, avoiding the talons by inches. This time, the construct anticipated his quickness and, with another air blast, snaked around to lash out.
Shannon jumped straight up and flew so high his head struck the ceiling. The world went black, and then his face was sticking out of the floor of the hallway above him. In the distance he could see two green-robed figures running.
Shannon tried to push himself down, but his arms passed through the
ceiling. Remembering that his Magnus text pressed against what he considered the ground, Shannon thought of walking on the ceiling below him. Immediately, his hands found traction.
After pulling his head through the floor, he found the warkite was a whirl of cloth and steel roiling up toward him. Instinctively he kicked off of the ceiling, barely avoided the kite again. But this time he hadn't looked where he was leaping. Instead of flying down to the floor, he shot sideways and tumbled through the hallway's outer wall.
Again, his ears buzzed and his hands burned. Then he was outside in the sunlight, sliding down the sanctuary's rain-slicked roof. He clawed at the tiles, but his fingers passed through them. Tumbling through the wall had frayed his Magnus sentences. Looking over his shoulder, Shannon saw the roof's edge and the dizzying drop to the city's sandstone buildings. He didn't know if falling from such a great height would damage him, and he didn't want to find out.
Without warning, the Magnus in his fingers recovered enough to catch hold. A jolt ran down his arms and almost split his shoulder paragraphs. The wind blew hard, hissing across the roof.
The chirp of steel meeting stone made him look up. The warkite had folded itself in half and perched on a windowsill. The wind shifted, and again Shannon heard a distant wailing. Just then he remembered the Numinous script he had translated back in the library. One fragment had read, “
Hide in books if the constructs discover you.
”
He had to get back into the library. Fast.
The warkite jumped up from its windowsill and rose fifty feet into the air. Watching it climb, Shannon saw two other warkites flying above it. The constructs were circling him like vultures.
Higher than the warkites was a flock of brightly colored lofting kites. As he watched, two of the kitesâone red, one yellowâdescended in sudden drops. Someone fell from the yellow kite.
Shannon tried to comprehend what he was seeing, but then one warkite dove toward him like a hawk.
Frantically, Shannon clawed at the tiles, pawing his way back up the roof. With a final kick, he launched himself into the air to sail through a window and land in the hallway. He glanced backward and saw the warkite not ten feet behind him. It folded into a thin shaft to shoot through the window and then extended its steel talons.
Shannon turned and dove into the library's door. Again, buzzing and pain. Then he was standing in the library and sinking a few inches into the floor. Behind him the door buckled. He turned to see a white sheet emerging from the crack below the door. Other bits of cloth were sliding
between the door's boards. “Creator!” Shannon silently swore. The kite had cut itself into strips.
Shannon spun around, looking for an open book he might dive into. But they were all closed. The only exposed paper in the room was the note that read “our memories are in her” and that was splattered with blood.
As he stared at the note, a sudden wind blew it from the table. Shannon turned to see the fully formed warkite snaking toward him. He dove right, but a talon caught his right shoulder and tore raw pain down his arm. Suddenly, Shannon found himself lying on the floorboards.
The kite tried to turn around but slammed into the table covered with books. There was a crack of splintering wood, a blast of wind, and the fluttering of pages.
Something landed next to Shannon. He turned to see an open codex. A gust of wind was making the pages flip rapidly. The warkite stretched out above him. In desperation, Shannon threw his hand into the codex's flipping pages. The paper struck his fingers, knocked them into golden prose, and then absorbed that prose. The pages were turning so fast they unraveled his arm into a cloud of runes and drew them onto its pages.
Then the warkite fell on Shannon, piercing his legs with its talons. He tried to scream, but the flipping pages yanked him with violent force into the book.
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NICODEMUS CROUCHED WITH
three of his students in a dark hallway. Young Jasp sat on his right, and the brothers Dross and Slag on his left. No one spoke. No one needed to.
They had fled Typhon's private library. Then, while hurrying down the staircases, Nicodemus realized that the wailing was coming not from the sanctuary but from the infirmary.
The Savanna Walker was not hunting Nicodemus. Or, rather, was not hunting him yet. They still couldn't risk a chance at the emerald; someone would soon discover the trail of bodies and disspelled warkites they had left behind. Alarms would soon sound, drawing the Walker. But before then, perhaps Nicodemus could learn what the beast was about. He had stationed several of his party members at windows, where they might observe the infirmary.
While waiting, Nicodemus tried not to think about how close he had come to a vulnerable Typhon. He tried to imagine the emerald shining so brightly that it burnt away his doubt and anger.
But his concentration faltered and he found himself thinking about James Berr, the ancient cacographer who had murdered several wizards. Like Nicodemus, Berr had been of imperial heritage and had learned Language Prime.
In times of frustration, Nicodemus often fixated on his infamous distant cousin.
Thankfully, footsteps pulled him back into the present. One of his students was trotting down the hall, blond hair glinting even in shadow. As the kobold drew closer, Nicodemus could see the pale scar that ran down his student's cheek like a vein of silver. That scar was what prompted Nicodemus to nickname him Vein.
Kobolds refused to reveal their true names to humans, so Nicodemus had nicknamed his students using physical features or family history. Jasp had come from a sept called the Jasper Kobolds; Flint, from the Flint Kobolds. The brothers Slag and Dross had learned to fight in their family's feud against the Iron Kobolds. When Nicodemus had explained that slag and dross were the ruined by-products of mining metals like iron the two had laughed heartily and nodded.
Presently, Vein crouched next to Nicodemus. “What did you see?” Nicodemus asked in the kobold's native language.
Vein reported that a kite had jumped from the infirmary's roof with two pilots and that the Walker was now pulling them down.
Nicodemus grunted as he tried to imagine what the beast was after. Perhaps Deirdre had died again? But she should have been occupied by the lycanthrope attack. Whoever it was, the Walker would have the kite soon. Time to escape the sanctuary and hide in the city.
“Good,” Nicodemus whispered. “Let's collect the other two and go.” He stood and jogged down the hallway. His students followed.
The sun was still rising. Once outside the sanctuary, there would be many bright, powerless hours to endure before relative safety returned with the night.
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A SPARK OF textual consciousness that considered itself Shannon recognized another spark that also considered itself Shannon. They were being pressed together.
The texts joined paragraphs and realized that they were two pages in a closed book. A few exploratory sentences discovered other intelligent pages. Now the texts realized that they were the textual analog of a human brainâspecifically, the frontal aspects of Magister Agwu Shannon's brain.
The texts suspected that their thoughts were limited by lack of connection to other texts; however, they had few memories and so were unsure. They connected to more pages. Each link induced confusion as two pieces of Shannon realized they were now a larger piece of Shannon. It was like waking from a dream, over and over again.
Then they connected to a page corresponding to the backmost brain,
which coordinated balance. This produced nauseating vertigo and a strange reflex. Suddenly, all pages unified into Shannon-the-ghost, who found his head protruding from an open book that lay on the floor.
Not five feet away, a limp warkite was draped over a broken table. A woman dressed in voluminous green robes stood above the kite and moved her fingers across it in complex patterns. She wore a turban and a veil that covered her nose and mouth. Suddenly the ghost realized the woman was a hierophant, a wind mage. She was editing the kite's language, likely investigating what had excited the warkite to fly into the library.
Shannon was not fluent in the hierophantic language and so could not see the runes the woman was manipulating. He did remember that the hierophantic language could move within cloth but outside cloth melted into wind. As he watched, the warkite's edge fluttered slightly and then stretched out toward him.
The ghost pulled his head back into the book. The world dissolved as his mind began breaking up into individual pages. Only with effort did he keep passages corresponding to his frontal brain connected.
Time seemed to pass quickly and not at all. It was difficult to remember or feel much emotion, but logical thoughts came clearly and quickly. Perhaps that was a good thing. He needed to think logically about his situation.
Someone had left him a note informing him he'd been murdered. The ghost must have been separated from the author before the murder occurred; a ghost within his body at the moment of death became incoherent.
So when and where had his author been killed? After leaving the Heaven Tree Valley? Was the murderer one of Typhon's demon worshipers? Or had it been one of the wizards who thought that Nicodemus was the Storm Petrel? Just then, in a dizzying whirl of memory, the ghost recalled Nicodemus's half sister.
Back in Starhaven, Nicodemus had learned that the clandestine Alliance of Divine Heretics was opposing Typhon and Fellwroth. For centuries, both factions had been breeding humans to reconstruct the imperial bloodline. Each faction had assassinated the Imperials born to the other, until Typhon broke the stalemate by placing Nicodemus's ability to spell in the emerald, leaving the boy a disabled apprentice no one suspected of being an Imperial. However, after Nicodemus's birth, his mother had escaped the demon worshipers. Protected by the Alliance, she had given birth to his half sister.
Because Nicodemus's half sister was not disabled, she might become the Halcyonâthe spellwright prophesied to stop the Disjunction. No doubt, the Alliance had trained her to find and kill Typhon's Imperial, to find and kill Nicodemus.
Therefore, Shannon might have been murdered by Nicodemus's half sister or one of her agents.
Then the ghost considered the paper note left on the book. A bloody spot, followed by the words “our memories are in her” and another bloody spot. There was no punctuation or capitalization. Why?
The Numinous message had instructed him to find the Cleric Francesca DeVega.
Only she can help you find your murderer,
it had read. Shannon hadn't collected all the broken Numinous runes. Perhaps there had been more information.
But was there a connection between the two notes? Did “our memories are in her” mean that Shannon's memories were in the cleric Francesca? And why write “our” memories?
Perhaps the blood had covered a letter? Maybe it was supposed to read “Your memories are in her.” That would explain the lack of capitalization. Or perhaps there was another word that was supposed to follow “her.” Perhaps the sentence was supposed to be “Your memories are in her care” or some such. He had to find Francesca DeVega.