Spellbreaker (15 page)

It was a trifling detail—a distasteful smudge compared to the bright day, the beautiful city. Most would have ignored it, but Leandra could not look away.

Spurred on by the godspell around her head, the divine aspects of Leandra's mind leapt forward. Her body, weakened by her recent prayer, flared into its disease. With her textual mind working so hotly, Leandra's perception continued to widen.

Leandra could sense every fiber of her robes, her headdress, the leather of her sandals. Then she sensed Holokai and Dhrun, their every divine sentence.

Out and out her divine perception stretched. Now it included the buildings around her, the mud in the alley, the mango rind, the shit. Her perception included more and more of the city until the limits of herself began to dissolve.

Now she not only sensed the city's whitewashed walls, but felt the hot sunlight shining upon them. Now she not only sensed the distant temple-mountains but also became their cool stone hallways. She became the docks. She was the wooden planks groaning under cargo and foot. She was the stalls up in the Hanging Market filled with bags of dark coffee, plates of ground taro root, tiny piles of sugar, larger piles of salt; pyramids of jackfruit, mountain apples, lychee; folded bolts of silk, arrays of hammered bronze amulets, jade necklaces, cheap baubles.

In the Water Temple, she was the marigolds on a young bride's flower necklaces. In the Lower Banyan District, she was a bougainvillea vine trying to swallow a kitchen wall. She was the smoke coming from a cooking fire, the wooden ring of a man striking his wife, the lone brass rupee in a beggar's bowl. She was a hovel in the Naukaa District, stinking and empty after a cholera outbreak. She was a squat plumeria tree dropping white petals on an old black dog.

“Lea!”

She discovered that Holokai was gripping her right arm. She was falling. Her vision dimmed.… Grab his arm.… Hold on.… Dhrun loomed over her, his dark face a mask of concern.

“You stopped breathing!” Holokai's voice boomed in her ear. He shook her. “I can't even look away from you for a second, hey? You start breathing now, okay? No fooling. Start breathing.”

He slapped her, hard. Everything shifted. Her cheek stung. At last, Leandra's perception began to consolidate.

“You start breathing, Lea!” Holokai shouted. “No fooling now!”

What he was saying … it seemed absurd … until … until …

He drew his hand back as if to slap her again, but now air rushed out of her lungs.

“No!” she squeaked between gasps of air. “I'm … breathing…”

She felt a tangle of emotions: terror, giddiness, a distance from the world as if she were intoxicated. She was clinging to Holokai's arm, panting.

They waited.

When her breathing finally slowed, Holokai asked, “It happen again? You becoming the city?”

“Yes.”

“Huh. You know how I could tell? You said that your disease flares make other people near you fluent in the magical languages you're near, right? Well, this time, I was looking over at four-arms over there”—he nodded at Dhrun—“and I could understand some of his prose. Pretty clever, hey?”

Leandra only nodded. Suddenly her vision blurred with tears. She stood up straight. She tried to rub the tears from her eyes. She thought of the beautiful things she had been, the disgusting ones: the shit and the wooden ring worn by a man beating his wife. The tears seemed to grow hotter in her eyes. “Creator damn it all, I hate this disgusting city!” she swore even as her heart ached for the beautiful city, her city.

She kept rubbing at her tears until they stopped. Hopefully this wouldn't rekindle her disease flare. Hopefully she wouldn't need to take the stress hormones again.

Holokai and Dhrun waited until Leandra could stand on her own. “It was that prayer to Baruvalman,” she said, “and this new spell around my head. That's what tipped me over.”

Holokai nodded. “Well then, no more tipping, hey?”

Dhrun gingerly touched her shoulder with his lower right arm.

“Are we ready to go?” she asked.

Dhrun answered. “We are, but there is no need to rush to your family compound if it's going to kill you.”

“Right,” she said and took a few deep breaths. “Right.” At last she turned toward the Jacaranda Steps. “I'm fine. Let's go.”

“Lea, you sure you're all right?” Holokai whispered, so softly that not even Dhrun could hear it. “If you do that again when I'm not around, that might be the end.”

“It's okay,” she said while gingerly feeling her tender belly. “There are worse ways to die. So come on, let's go find one.”

 

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The ghost ship listed. A sailor was rowing Nicodemus from the first barge to the smoldering ship, the bay water blue around them.

The pilot of the lead barge had seen a column of smoke as their convoy left the Matrunda River and entered the Bay of Standing Islands. The captain had wanted to avoid any trouble, but Nicodemus ordered him to investigate.

Over the horizon had come a small junk. What was left of her rigging smoldered. Not a stitch of sail remained. Scorch marks raked her bow. No one moved on her deck and not even the loudest of hails raised a soul from belowdecks.

Nicodemus had sent Doria, Sir Claude, and three armed sailors to investigate. When Doria had shouted for him to follow, he knew they had found something important. The swells were minimal, so Nicodemus made it to the ghost ship's deck without taking an embarrassing dip into the bay.

First Nicodemus noticed the bodies. Four men. Or, Nicodemus corrected himself, very likely four men. Two were burnt beyond recognition of sex. The other two wore drab, bloodstained lungi and were sprawled on deck.

Then Nicodemus noticed the smell. Burnt flesh and … something else … Doria was standing by the mast, frowning at a book in her hands. “There's a smell like…” he said and paused to sniff. “Maybe like … hot metal maybe … or like sulfur?”

“It smells like vog,” she said without looking up from her book.

“Vog?”

“Pollution from active volcanoes or from lava flows meeting the sea. It can get pretty bad north of the big island and near the active volcanoes on the outer island chain.”

Nicodemus sniffed again. “But there's no active volcano near here, is there?”

“Not for hundreds of miles.”

“Then why should this boat smell like vog?”

“I'm not sure, but it's hardly her most pressing mystery.” She held up the book. “According to the captain's journal, she's a merchant sailing out of Feather Island, makes a run to Chandralu once every three days or so. Sometimes she takes commissions to ship cargo to the other sea villages. Three days ago she was in Chandralu. The last entry put her in Feather Island yesterday. There's no entry about departure. The hold has been half emptied. The ballast is off. She's tilted back.”

Nicodemus looked at the bodies. “You think she had to leave her home port in a hurry?”

Doria clapped the book shut. “I do. Even a half competent crew would have redistributed her cargo. If she was attacked on the water, the pirates would have taken her as prize or sunk her.”

“So what attacked her in the harbor? Never known raiders to burn someone that badly.” He nodded to one of the blackened bodies. “Not in combat at least. A fire neodemon?”

“I'd say lava neodemon, given the scent of vog. But given what's in the cabin, it's got to be more than your commonplace lava neodemon.”

“What's in the cabin?”

Doria took a deep breath. “There are some things in my life I wish I could unsee and unremember. What is in the cabin, it's one of those things.”

“That bad?”

“That bad.”

Nicodemus raised his eyebrows. Doria wasn't one to exaggerate. He followed her aft. The moment he set foot in the cabin he regretted it. Three bodies were huddled in the corner, all badly burned, all of them children. The oldest couldn't have been more than six.

“Seeing how they're huddled, I'm guessing the crew was trying to get them off the island, away from whatever was attacking,” Doria said beside him. “The children's burns are bad, but not bad enough to kill. It's mysterious. Those two however…” she gestured behind Nicodemus.

He turned to find two adult bodies sitting against the wall, their heads lolling at odd angles. Below the neck, each man was painted with blackening blood. In each hand, each man held a curved knife. “Opened each other's throats?” he asked.

“Too far apart. Slit their own.”

“Madness then. Something drove them mad.”

“Something on Feather Island,” someone said from behind them. Nicodemus looked back to see a pale Rory and a thin-lipped Sir Claude standing in the doorway. Their expressions were tense. Apparently the present situation was enough to quell their feud.

Nicodemus nodded. “Or something that was on Feather Island a few hours ago.”

Doria sighed. “Should we continue on to Chandralu?”

Nicodemus rolled his neck as he thought. His keloid scar was itching again. Distracted, he wondered if he should rewrite the tattooed spells around it. But then he forced himself to focus. Head to the city or investigate? “If we did find trouble on Feather Island, we'd be in river barges, which are hardly ideal for fighting. And except for Doria, none of us is suited for combat afloat.”

Doria shrugged. “Leandra on her catamaran and with her shark god in tow wouldn't be a bad idea … but, Nico, what if this neodemon gets away?”

“My Lord Warden,” Sir Claude added, “the neodemon who did this must have very, very malicious requisites. Burning his victims, driving them to…”

Nicodemus nodded. “One of the deadliest creatures I have ever faced was the Savanna Walker of Avel. He had been born with the same capabilities that I have, but by distorting his Language Prime and his magical language, he learned how to wound the minds around him, causing insanity.”

Doria made a thoughtful sound. “You never told me the Savanna Walker produced carnage like this.”

Nicodemus shook his head. “It was different. The Savanna Walker could induce blindness, deafness, aphasia, that sort of thing. When he completely corrupted a mind, he made men his homicidal slaves. But he never made men suicidal and he had no power of flame. The lava neodemon that did this may be as dangerous or even more so. Sir Claude, I take your point. We can't let this monster roam the bay.”

The knight bowed his head.

Nicodemus turned to look at the three children. He tried not to shudder. “It seems I had better figure how much we will have to bribe the captain to change course for Feather Island.”

Whatever trouble Leandra had gotten herself into, she was going to have to manage it alone for a bit longer. And whatever had made Leandra think she might murder her mother … well … he would just have to trust his wife and daughter to find some way to avoid killing each other.

 

CHAPTER TWELVE

Empress Vivian Niyol, the Blessed Halcyon, the Creator's Champion of Humanity, the Future Vanquisher of Los and his Demonic Invasion, the Sovereign of all the Kingdoms of the Second Neosolar Empire—whose exalted person had been raised above every menial task—had to line edit.

And it was glorious.

Vivian had to line edit every waking moment without pause, rest, reservation. She wrote in Numinous. Its golden spun-glass sentences coursed into her room from every direction and wove themselves into an incandescent halo suspended a few inches above her head. Down from this halo a hundred thousand sentences dropped like lightning bolts to pierce her brain.

This was her master spell.

Maintenance of this glorious text required all of her attention, all of her strength. The text was of staggering length and spread out from her in all directions for several miles, coordinating several thousand subspells of many different languages.

The task of constantly casting, recasting, editing, rewriting the master spell required so much of Vivian's mind that it intoxicated her. Literally, wonderfully. Her existence had become trancelike. The intricacy of the world had been replaced by innumerable concatenating paragraphs, the brightness of the sky by a luminosity of prose.

In this exalted state, Vivian could not remember or understand things which previously had been elementary. She knew that she sat on a wide comfortable wooden throne. The room around her was small, but furnished with thickly woven rugs and white cushions. She remembered, vaguely, that along one wall ran a gallery of windows looking out onto blue sky and swirling clouds. But the brilliance of her Numinous text outshone the daylight and illuminated the dark. Vivian had lost track of time shortly after she had first cast this master spell twenty days … or had it been thirty … or even forty … days ago. She couldn't tell.

And as for the spell's function … it was for … for … She could remember only that it was designed to fool her half-brother Nicodemus.

Older memories were clearer. For example, around her neck she wore a simple silver necklace, which held the Emerald of Arahest against her chest. She remembered that it was only through this magical artifact that she could cast and recast the master spell.

She remembered that the Emerald held her half-brother's ability to spell. The demon Typhon had stolen this ability into the Emerald when Nicodemus was an infant. Vivian had been born with an identical ability; however, years ago, during the intrigue in Avel, the creature known as the Savanna Walker had destroyed that portion of Vivian's mind.

After Typhon had been defeated, Nicodemus had given her the Emerald. At first she had not understood it. His explanation at the time—that his cacography had made him a champion for creativity and intuitiveness in language—had seemed weak.

However, once Nicodemus had begun to cast his metaspells and new divinities swarmed across the league kingdoms, she had seen how shrewd her half-brother had been to give up the Emerald. Nicodemus was infinitely more dangerous without it. He and his demonically written wife had created a new, dangerous civilization through exploitation of religion and superstition.