Spellbreaker (71 page)

Dimly she became aware of her parents crying above her body. Briefly she was the salt in a tear—whose she couldn't tell, perhaps her own.

But then her consciousness projected downward into the lake. She was a dark and ancient fish flicking its fins through crystalline currents. Her mind expanded into the aqueous spells that the hydromancers had been pouring into the crater lake for a thousand years. Leandra became every last magical rune in that wide body of water. She was the greatest reserve of energy yet created by humanity. In the last act of her life, Leandra used her mortal talent to transform that reserve of power and make it rise up.

The waters of the crater lake began to churn and to shine. Slowly at first but then with gathering violence, the waters flowed around creating a mile-wide whirlpool.

Leandra's parents and her onetime lover emerged from the Floating Palace. Her own limp body lay in her father's arms.

Her parents ran along a pontooned bridge. But the whirlpool was spinning faster now. The pageantry of floating craft was dragged around and around in a chaos of wood and rope. The bridges broke apart. Her parents and her lover fell into the churning blue.

And then, the transformation of the energy complete, the language of the lake erupted as a blazing glory of light.

Leandra had become that eruption, a force of violence and permanent change. She blasted up the volcano's crater and high into the sky. She had become a metaspell more powerful than any yet imagined. The wind caught and blew her in a thousand different directions.

Part of her settled upon the beautiful and disgusting city of Chandralu. Leandra became the fish wives and goddesses and lovers and thieves. Part of her was blown across a bay and then across an archipelago where she became the farmers and children and murderers and healers and ghosts and gods of the archipelago.

Out across the ocean she spread to a kingdom of arid plains and deserts. And she was every kind of soul spreading herself farther and farther east from tiny homesteads to glorious adobe cities vibrant with the lives of millions.

And down the peninsula she swept, over waving grass, and she became lycanthropes and kobolds and hierophants in their wind gardens. And farther south she spread and wrapped herself around the shell of an ancient city made into a wizardly academy. And, for a moment, she swirled more tightly around this place where once her father had been a crippled boy. In the nearby forests, there were ghosts of an extinct people who stirred in their dark recesses and shuddered when they realized that the change her father had begun had come to fruition.

And then Leandra sped over snowy mountains to a kingdom filled with rain and cathedrals and farmers and smiths and seraphs. And then she passed into a kingdom of ancient forests and druids and hunters and vast orchards and secluded groves.

Having reached the end of the human lands and having touched every soul, the metaspell that Leandra had become was blown north again over the sea and toward the volcano from which she sprang.

And so it was that Leandra's soul dissipated itself across the great circle of the world into a single, precise change.

 

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

In death a body acquires a peculiar weight. It wants to go to ground. In defiance of living arms that haul and lift, a corpse flops and lolls. When moving together, the living and the dead make an awkward dance—one that Francesca had seen too many times. That was why, when she saw the way Nicodemus was pulling Leandra onto the rocky lakeshore, she knew that her daughter was dead.

Nicodemus and Leandra were both facing out toward the wreckage that was the Floating City. He had slipped his arms under hers to haul her by the chest. Her head and arms hung limply as he took backward steps up the shore. His sandaled foot slipped on a rock and together they crumpled. His face twisted into an agony that had nothing to do with the rock bruising his back.

Francesca had come out of the water a few hundred feet away. She had been picking her way along the rocky shore, looking with rising panic for her husband and daughter. Now that she saw them, she could not move. Her body seemed a prison, her heart a hollow space. But then Dhrun touched her arm. Out in the whirlpool, the goddess had helped Francesca stay afloat until the force of the water had pushed a boat between them. Later, Dhrun had come out of the water only a few feet away from Leandra.

Now the goddess's warm hand sparked Francesca back into motion. Her physician's reflexes returned. Suddenly she was hurrying over the rocky shore. Often she slipped and had to bend down to put her hands on a rock to steady herself. Ahead, Nicodemus had moved out from under Leandra and was cradling her head in his lap, saying something to her.

It took a small eternity to reach the pair. Deep down, Francesca knew her daughter was dead, but something made her kneel beside her daughter and check for breath or a pulse. There was none. She pushed Nicodemus aside and began to compress her daughter's chest. A little water spilled from Leandra's mouth. Francesca tilted Leandra's head back and blew two breaths into her lungs. Then she went back to chest compressions. Dimly she was aware of Nicodemus and Dhrun beside her.

Time stretched out, every moment an eternity. Francesca gave her daughter two more breaths and then went back to pushing on her chest. It was only when she felt one of her daughter's ribs break that the vitality ebbed out of Francesca like wine from an overturned bottle.

Then she was in Nicodemus's arms and weeping. She wrapped her arms around her husband, pulled him into her with all her strength.

Grief shook Francesca in obliterating paroxysms, again and again until nothing seemed to be left of herself. Then she pulled away from her husband to dry her face and breathe deeply.

Nicodemus closed Leandra's eyes, straightened her wet hair and clothes. In one hand he found a silver chain attached to a shattered emerald. He held the broken pieces in his palm. At first he stared at them with numbed sorrow, but then he frowned.

With the muscles of his forearm, Nicodemus forged an intricate Numinous paragraph and then cast it into the air. It hung and rotated slowly. Francesca recognized the paragraph as a complex governing spell used to coordinate the action of several subspells. It was difficult prose, the kind of thing that Nicodemus's cacography prevented him from writing. Francesca supposed that although the Emerald was shattered, it still conferred great ability.

But then Nicodemus dropped the broken emerald onto Leandra's lap. Impossibly, he reproduced the same Numinous spell.

Francesca blinked. “You shouldn't be able to do that.”

“I shouldn't,” he agreed and then wrote two Magnus subspells and edited them into the governing Numinous text. The resulting hybrid spell folded itself into a conformation that Francesca did not recognize, but the spell's function was unimportant. “I shouldn't be able to write this.”

“No…” she agreed. They both looked at Leandra. “She removed your cacography?”

“More than that,” a creaking voice said into Francesca's ear; “she's removed everyone's cacography.”

Francesca looked up and saw the Trimuril's true incarnation standing a few feet away. Despite enduring the chaos of the whirlpool, the goddess seemed no different: short, androgynous, six arms, shaved head, slight potbelly, infuriating smile.

“Traitor!” Nicodemus snarled while leaping to his feet. He made a lunge for the goddess, but she jumped backward and landed with perfect poise on a bolder seven feet away. Nicodemus, however, slipped on a rock and had to put both hands down before he could stand again.

“That's no way to start a new game,” the voice of Ancestor Spider creaked in Francesca's ear, while the Trimuril's incarnation bowed.

“Game?” Nicodemus growled and took two awkward steps toward the goddess. “You betrayed us to the empire.”

Ancestor Spider laughed. “Oh, I did not betray you to the empire.”

Now it was Francesca's turn to laugh. “You can't expect us to believe you didn't know the Sacred Regent and the empress were talking.”

The Trimuril's smile did not waver. “I did not betray you to the empire, I merely thought I was betraying you.”

Francesca glared. “You'll forgive us if that doesn't exactly improve our opinion of you.”

“I will forgive you then. It's not your good opinion I'm hoping for, but your help in completing your daughter's plans.”

Nicodemus stopped. “What in the burning hells do you mean?”

“I thought I was betraying your family to the empire. It was going to be a simple exchange. They get you; we get to survive. Waiting for Lorn or Dral to send a fleet would have been too great a risk. What would be the point of preserving the league if it meant our destruction? So we discussed the possibility of selling you to the empire.”

“You could have told us,” Francesca growled.

“And what would you have done differently? Perhaps you would have been more patient about trying to smuggle Leandra out of the city, but in the long run that wasn't going to make a difference. You needed to put her ahead of the kingdom. In any case, the Sacred Regent and I thought we were being clever. We thought we were hiding our treachery. It was going to take time. We had no contact with the empress and, far worse, we had no way of knowing if we could subdue Leandra. She was Los Reincarnated, after all, not someone you could simply knock on the back of the head and toss in a sack. That is when Magistra D'Valin came to us.”

“Ellen!” Francesca growled before remembering the conspiratorial glance that Leandra and Ellen had shared in the throne room … just before Leandra had broken free. “Where is Ellen?”

With one of her hands, the Trimuril pointed up the crater slope. They were almost directly below the tunnel that connected Chandralu to the Floating City. A crowd had gathered on the plaza before the tunnel. “Magistra D'Valin is with the survivors,” the Trimuril said through Ancestor Spider. “You four were the last out of the Floating Palace. Most everyone else had an easier time getting out of the water. Though, tragically, a few drowned.”

Francesca frowned at the crowd, which had divided itself into those of the empire and those of Chandralu.

The Trimruil continued to explain, “Magistra D'Valin came to us claiming that she had become Leandra's personal physician and that she could orchestrate a bloodless capture of your entire family. We were skeptical of her allegiance, but then she revealed to us that she had been in contact with every powerful citizen of Chandralu who feared Leandra because she was Los. Ellen claimed that after watching Leandra paralyze Nicodemus, she had realized that the woman was too dangerous. She claimed to have been devoted to you, Francesca, but that your vision had been clouded by love for your daughter. It was Ellen who made contact with the empress and planned your betrayal … or so we thought.”

“So you thought?” Nicodemus repeated.

The Trimuril nodded. “You must now see that the whole thing was planned by Leandra.”

Francesca looked at her daughter's corpse, so small in death, her features frail, her skin pale.

The Trimuril continued. “To change the world as she did, Leandra needed to obtain the Emerald of Arahest while on the Floating City. That is why she fooled us all.”

“Change the world?” Francesca asked.

“Ah, yes, Leandra's legacy. It seems that she was correct when she pointed out that in her last life she had ended an epoch on the Ancient Continent and would soon end an epoch in this life. Leandra has made every living human being a spellwright.”

“She what?” Nicodemus asked.

“She has changed the nature of magical language so that it made itself part of humanity. Just as every child learns to speak without conscious effort, so now the whole world is learning to spellwright.”

“She didn't change my cacography,” Nicodemus asked, in wonder, “she changed language?”

The Trimuril nodded. “There will no longer be such a thing as cacography. There will no longer be such a thing as illiteracy. Therefore I would bet that you no longer misspell Language Prime.”

Nicodemus's face creased into concentration. Then he dropped into a crouch and began peering among the rocks. His hand darted down and then came up with a small black beetle. The hapless insect crawled along Nicodemus's hand for an inch without bulging into a grotesque tumor. The beetle snapped open its glossy carapace and, with a buzz of tiny wings, flew away. Nicodemus laughed.

Sudden understanding made Francesca's eyes sting. She didn't think she was making any noise, but when she looked up she found Nicodemus and Dhrun staring at her.

“What is it?” Nicodemus asked.

Francesca wiped away her fresh tears. “Lea found the third way out. We all thought that we had to choose between the empire and the league, but she took us all in a new direction. Now the imperial spellwrights won't exploit illiterates, and there will be no proliferation of neodemons praying upon the powerless in the league.” She laughed. “There won't even be an empire or a league.” She looked down at her daughter and her vision again blurred with tears. Francesca smiled because she was both happy and in horrible pain.

Ancestor Spider cleared a tiny throat in her ear. “That is the gist of things, yes, but maybe you go a bit far in suggesting there will be no league and no empire. At the moment, there are millions of newly made spellwrights who strongly believe in empire and league … which leads us to our present game.”

“I am getting sick of your games,” Nicodemus said flatly.

The Trimuril's hands clapped in pleasure. “Oh, but this is not my game. This is Leandra's game. You would not be playing for my sake. I trust you will never again do anything for my sake.”

“Not unless it involves inflicting excruciating pain upon you,” Nicodemus grumbled. “I might do that for your sake.”

“Precisely so,” Ancestor Spider agreed. “This is Leandra's game. In an instant, she destroyed the systems of our world. Now we have to create new ones before things become … messy. And though I hate to disturb your bereavement, the whole archipelago now needs you to play a major role in this game.”