“Cyrus,” she said evenly, “this is not about us.”
His voice became cold. “Whoever said it was?”
She looked him in the eyes. “I'm sorry things ended as they did.”
“Why should you be sorry?” he said, returning her gaze. “I'm certainly not sorry. You're now a physician. And I'm one step away from making captain. Clearly, we made the right decisions.”
Francesca paused. His tone sounded genuine, but ⦠well, she had always thought that he had felt differently about their parting. “Of course,” she said at last. “Of course. I'm sorry.” She paused. “But, Cyrus, Deirdre also told me a rogue wizard is somewhere in or near Avel. A man named Nicodemus Weal.”
Cyrus started to say something but then stopped. He went to a corner of the landing bay and put down the neatly folded red jumpchute. “Nicodemus Weal? The mad apprentice that killed a bunch of wizards in Starhaven ten years ago? The one that got the academics all worked up about prophecy?”
Glad to see Cyrus away from the red cloth, Francesca went to him. “It sounds mad, but we can't dismiss the claim. Deirdre said he might be staying with the Canic people in the North Gate District. When we know things are safe in the sanctuary, you have to take me back to Avel to investigate.”
“Francesca,” he said and then paused. “I agree that this affair requires investigation. But not by you or me. You're a cleric; I'm a pilot. You should be healing; I should be flying. I will discuss this matter with the wind marshal and the tower warden. Between the three of us, we can secure an audience with Canonist Cala. A proper investigation will be launched.”
Francesca felt her hands go cold. She eyed his robe. Perhaps she was wasting time talking. With every breath he was slowly replenishing his text. “Cyrus,” she said evenly, carefully, “your logic would be impeccable if it weren't for the possibility that a damned demon is controlling Avel and so the canonist.”
He shook his head. “It's too far-fetched. I'll be careful when discussing this with the tower warden and the marshal.”
Heat flushed across Francesca's face. It was hard to keep her tone level. “What if they're serving the demon?”
He looked at her. “You've just been through a harrowing experience. Something attacked the sanctuary. A woman claiming to be an avatar pushed you out of a lofting kite. You're not thinking clearly.”
Francesca fished the Numinous disspell she'd been writing in her bicep and moved it into her balled fist. “I am thinking perfectly clearly, thank you. And I cannot allow you to tell the tower warden or the marshal of this matter. It's too dangerous.”
“It is my duty to.”
“Your duty is to protect Avel. If a demon ⦔
He was shaking his head. “You can't stop me.”
Hot fear rose inside Francesca; she had to stop him. She searched for her most authoritative tone. “I will stop you, Cyrus. I must.”
He folded his arms. “So this is why you wouldn't talk when we were aloft? So you couldn't toss a wizardly disspell at me without knocking us both out of the sky? You always were a more powerful spellwright, but you must knowâ” He started to unfold his arms.
Francesca flicked her hand out and cast her netlike disspell at his chest. Her prose wrapped around him. The powerful golden sentences moved through his robes, disspelling any text they encountered. She extemporized a clawed Magnus paragraph and threw it onto the folded red cloth. When the paragraph grabbed hold, she yanked hard a connecting sentence and so pulled the cloth out of Cyrus's reach.
“Don't make this harder than ⦔ Her voice died.
He was staring at her, making no attempt to rid his robes of her disspell.
In that instant, Francesca recognized her mistake.
Calmly, Cyrus laid his hand on the landing bay's wall. In the next instant, a strip of sailcloth jumped out of the wall and struck Francesca's thigh where it wove itself into the fabric of her robes. She forged defensive language in both arms and tried to pull away.
But Cyrus had invested her robes with hierophantic language, and they
became as stiff as iron. She began to forge disspells in her tongue, intending to spit them onto her sleeves, but the cleric's stole she wore around her shoulders twisted into a cord and wrapped around her forehead.
The world dissolved into whiteness.
Squinting in the sunlight, Nicodemus examined his school of five false lepers.
Shannon stood beside him, leaning on a walking stick. “My boy,” he muttered, “remind me why I didn't question your escape plan deeply enough to discover you intended to kill us with costumes.”
Both Shannon and Nicodemus were dressed in the itchy gray robes of Northern Spirish holy men sworn to care for the sick and destitute. Before them, on rain-wet terracotta tiles, squatted Nicodemus's kobold students. All were wrapped from toe to nose tip in the dirty rags of lepers.
Nicodemus studied them now. Vein was looking about wearily while Slag and Dross argued with each other. Flint and Jasp crouched as if resting.
All kobolds distrusted humans. When forced to interact with men, they instinctively hid as much of their bodies and identities as possible. Presently this desire for secrecy manifested in the kobolds' tense posture and in the way they huddled together as if to block out the rest of the world. Fortuitously, this body language reinforced the illusion that they were in fact a group of lepers, shunned by society.
Nicodemus adjusted his gray headdress. Shannon had a point; a convincing disguise was not the same thing as safety. But according to Nicodemus's original plan, they should have recovered the emerald or died by now. Either would have made escape unnecessary.
“The problem with disguised escape plans,” Shannon continued, “is that they often become disguised suicide plans.”
“Magister, you're overreacting,” Nicodemus muttered. “Neither the Walker nor the demon will suspect us of hiding in sunlight.”
Shannon only readjusted his grip on Azure; he was obliged to hide his parrot familiar in a wrapped-up rag.
They were standing in the Courtyard of Lesser Benediction on the northern border of the sanctuary's complex. It was a plain public square. Here, two or three times a day, Avel's poor came to receive flatbread and sing to Cala. When making these devotions, they allowed the demigod's godspell to siphon some of their bodily strength into Cala's ark. Wealthier
citizens made devotions only every other day in courtyards decorated with fountains and hanging flowers.
Some form of this devotional ritualâsometimes incorporating song, sometimes prayer, sometimes silent meditationâwas practiced in every major city on the human continent. This was how the deities accrued power.
Of the five hundred souls gathered around Nicodemus, most were simply poor; others had lost limbs, vision, sanity, or all three.
No one noticed Nicodemus's party. The Spirish believed leprosy was a punishment for a past sin. In times of plenty, lepers were shunned; in times of famine, they were expelled onto the savanna to face lycanthropes. Only the Ixoniansâwhose hydromancers could cure leprosy with their aqueous spellsâtreated lepers differently.
With his Language Prime fluency, Nicodemus had seen the infection that caused leprosy and knew the sick were innocent of any causal sin. Though disgusted by how lepers were regarded, Nicodemus had no qualms exploiting that prejudice for his benefit. No one in Avel would look at his rag-wrapped students long enough to realize their figures were inhumanly broad chested and large limbed. Or, if someone did, they would attribute such bodies to disfiguring disease.
“The raid was a failure,” Nicodemus admitted to his mentor. “I am sorry, Magister. I had no idea the Walker would return to the sanctuary that quickly. But we will still find a way to recover the emerald and cure you.”
The old man frowned and then exhaled. “Not a failure. You killed the three librarians. The pyromancer must have been Typhon's contact with demon worshipers in Trillinon. The hydromancer the same for Ixos. In fact, the hydromancer must have been the one shipping lucerin into Avel.”
“But we were so close, right next to the vulnerable demon. Perhaps we could have hacked through the door if you were with me instead of standing guard at our backs.”
“No, my boy, it was better to leave me as a lookout. I'm too weak to hack through anything.”
“And if only the Walker hadn't returned from the lycanthrope attack so damned fast,” Nicodemus grumbled. “Faster than ever before.” He looked up at the octagonal dome with its red-tile roof and sandstone minarets. The Walker had now climbed up to the canonist's quarters.
Nicodemus found himself thinking about the monster's ability to inflict aphasia; it was unsettlingly analogous to his own disability. Cacography prevented one from forming written words, aphasia from forming spoken words. There had to be a reason for this similarity. Perhaps something Typhon had planned?
“My boy, are you all right?”
Shannon's words made Nicodemus start. “I'm fine,” he said. “Only thinking about the Savanna Walker. The beast thinks he's so clever, but he's just a heap of flesh and pretentious prose.”
Shannon laughed. “He seems to feel the same way about you.”
“He is unbelievably powerful within the sanctuary walls, I will give him that. But if I could just catch him outside the city at night.”
“There was that time two dry seasons ago when the two of you wrestled below the dam.”
“Doesn't count. How was I to know he'd filled that damn gate with lucerin dilution?”
“There was that night in Coldlock Harbor. Your fishing boat scheme.”
Despite himself, Nicodemus shivered. “Doesn't count either. Who knew orca whales could come in so close to shore or that the Savanna Walker could do ⦠that ⦠to them?”
Shannon rubbed his temples. “I still have nightmares about thrashing around in that water. The dark figures swimming below us, and all that ⦠blood.”
Nicodemus felt his cold anger grow but changed the subject. “Magister, your ghost, I wanted to sayâ”
“We won't talk about it.”
“But, Magister, Typhon has held that ghost captive for a year. Surely, the demon has rewritten him. We had to try to deconstruct him.”
Shannon turned toward him, his all-white eyes unreadable. “Yes. Of course. And if you had proper wizardly training, if you'd just listened to me back in Heaven Tree Valley, you would have destroyed the ghost instead of letting it escape back to Typhon.”
“Magister, we couldn't have stayed in the valley. As I've told you a hundred timesâ”
“You have. We're finished.”
“Magister,” Nicodemus started to say, but just then the courtyard grew quiet and all eyes turned toward the dais at the far end. A procession of Celestial devotees had emerged bearing a litter. With practiced ceremony, they laid down the litter and folded back its doors to reveal a topaz standing stone about five feet tallâa sliver of Canonist Cala's ark.
One devotee made a brief speech, praising the high sky goddess, Celeste, and her canon of demigods. Then the devotees led all in a song of prayer.
As they sang, a modicum of Nicodemus's strength ebbed away as Cala's godspell withdrew it. The tall topaz stone shone brighter as it gained strength from those assembled.
Nicodemus had spent his childhood in the wizardly academy of Starhaven.
The patron god of wizards, Hakeem, rarely required devotion from his followers. As such, wizards lived an almost atheistic life, infrequently offering their strength to a deity and even more infrequently receiving that deity's protection.
When Nicodemus had arrived in Avel, he had been shocked by the devotions Cala demanded and outraged that the needy citizens should make devotions twice as often as the rich. The hungry had no other choice; flatbread was handed to the poor after devotions.
However, Nicodemus's disquiet about Cala had dissipated when his companion, Boannâherself a nearly vanquished river goddessâhad explained how much Cala did for her citizens.
It was only the canonist's godspell that kept the city walls standing despite the earthquakes, grassfires, lycanthrope attacks. It was only Cala who held the water in the reservoir during the long dry season. If the people of Avel stopped praying for the walls to hold, they would end up in lycanthrope throats. If they stopped praying for the dam to stand, they would die of thirst.
Similar arrangements between deities and humans existed throughout the six human kingdoms. Did the poor and powerless bear most of the burden of empowering the deities? Certainly. It had always been so and was likely to remain so. But, as Boann pointed out, the inequity of divine governance was a small matter compared with Typhon's quest to bring the rest of the demonic host across the ocean.
Nicodemus had begun to realize how sheltered he had been in the academy.
As the devotional song ended and the impoverished lined up for flatbread, Nicodemus felt hollow. He had to hide his false lepers until nightfall. He had to quell Shannon's anger and despair at losing his ghost or the hopelessness would kill the old man before the canker curse growing in his gut. Nicodemus had to recover the emerald to cure Shannon, free Deirdre, defeat Typhon. In all these tasks, there was no earthly deity to whom he could pray for help.
So, when the song ended, Nicodemus led his school out of the courtyard and silently prayed to a deity who took no part in the world because he was the world.
Nicodemus prayed to the Creator.