Spellbound (41 page)

Authors: Blake Charlton

BOOK: Spellbound

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James fought back for the first twenty blows or so. Then blood was splattered across his face and his nose was broken one way. His arms and legs moved in feeble random motions. Nicodemus was screaming, long wordless wails, rising and falling like a chant. His vision blurred with tears. His arms kept swinging, battering Berr's face first right then left, right then left.

Nicodemus picked up a rock and hammered it hard onto his cousin's face. He felt a tooth break under the blow. He struck again and felt more snap. He slammed the rock into the ridge above his cousin's eye, shattering the bone beneath.

Nicodemus couldn't see anymore; the tears and blood had transformed the visible world into a stinging blur. But he struck with the rock again and again, missing his cousin's head and hitting throat, chest, shoulder, breaking one collarbone. He howled and howled until he had no more breath left and the world spun.

He fell over onto his hands and knees, gagged, tried to vomit. He couldn't. Desperate for breath, he sucked in short gasps of air. Gagged again. Came up with a mouthful of stomach acid. Spat it out.

Crying. Crying, bawling like a baby. Nicodemus fell onto his elbows, face pressed against the ground, sandy soil sticking to the tears and blood
and sweat on his cheek, sucking in long breaths with bits of grass and sand. Crying. Crying â¦ long gasps of breath â¦ breath slowing.

At last the world stopped spinning. He used his arm to wipe the blood and tears from his eyes and saw James Berr, face broken into a nightmare of tissue and bone. One eyeball torn open in its broken socket.

But James Berr was still breathing.

Without feeling, Nicodemus dropped the rock and then put his knee on the half dragon's windpipe. When he used his weight to mash Berr's windpipe shut, the man did not struggle.

Only a little while to wait for death.

But then a shudder ran through Nicodemus. He had killed many times during his years in Avel, often snuffing out hierophants for committing no greater crime than unknowingly serving a demon.

Now Nicodemus removed his knee from the throat of a murderer, a savage subhuman. The older cacographer would not have to teach Nicodemus how to become a monster. Nicodemus already knew how. Slowly, he stood. Beneath him, Berr continued to breathe.

Maybe the old man would drown in his own blood. Maybe a savanna predator would devour him. That would be fitting. Maybe he would survive. Did it matter?

Though Nicodemus was standing above his foe with a thundering heart and heaving chest, part of him lay dying on the valley floor.

Or perhaps it had died long ago.

It didn't matter. Nicodemus felt too sharply the course of Berr's life: the violent rage of a disabled child, an exile from home and later from humanity, enslavement by Typhon. Berr had made his life into savage pain; others had transformed him into a creature of agony. It was disgusting. It was pitiful. And Nicodemus clung to this shred of pity. It was, he thought, the last thing protecting him from what the Savanna Walker truly was. On the ground, James Berr moaned.

Nicodemus turned away. He couldn't bring himself to kill his cousin. Slowly, he walked out of the valley.

CHAPTER
Forty-four

Francesca couldn't sleep. Cyrus lay next to her in the white silk tent. He was wrapped tight against the chill, his eyes peaceful, his breath puffing out his veil. She rolled over. It was too hot under the sheets. She sat up and crawled outside. Around her she found other dark tents and the tether rising into the night to connect to the still-flying half of the airship.

The blackmoon had set, and the sky was awash with stars. Francesca looked up and bit her lip. The cold air felt good on her face. She sighed and then jumped when two dark figures faced her.

The first she recognized by his short stature and turban as Captain Izem. But it took a moment to realize that the second man was Nicodemus.

She ran to him and cast a golden question before even coming to a stop:
“What happened?”
By the light of her words, she saw his blood-splattered face and chest. He caught the question with a hand he had been cleaning with a bloody rag. His knuckles were a motley of lacerations.
“Are you in pain? Are you aware of any major wound?”

He began wiping the blood from his arms and cast a reply:
“I'm not hert. There's no need to worry.”

“Well then, WHAT IN THE BURNING HELLS HAPPENED?”

His hands trembled as he cast the response.
“I'm vary cold and hungry. Give me a moment, plaese.”

Francesca's head spun as she realized that he was delaying; he didn't want to tell her the bad news. She sat down hard. Suddenly Nicodemus was squatting next to her. His lips were moving and then he cast a sentence:
“I'm sory. Im so sorry.”

Francesca knew then that she would remain deaf. Never again would she remember her mother's voice or listen to a heart's beat. Never again would she hear music. Nicodemus hovered above her, making awkward motions as if starting to comfort her but then realizing he couldn't touch her. He turned and called to someone behind her.

Suddenly Izem appeared and dropped what seemed to be twenty pounds of silk onto Nicodemus, covering every inch of his skin. Nicodemus put his arms around Francesca. He pulled her gently in. It felt like being comforted
by a pillow. But Francesca didn't care; she turned into his embrace and cried into the silk.

He rocked her for a while, but then a pair of hands pulled her up onto her feet. She turned and saw Cyrus's worried eyes. She must have woken him with her crying. He embraced her and stroked her hair.

When she was calmer, Nicodemus wrote an outline of what had happened: the revelation that the Savanna Walker was James Berr, the Walker's belief that Francesca had never had memories or the ability to hear and that her mind was similar to a demon's. None of it made a snap of sense.

Numbly, Francesca let Cyrus lead her back to their tent. He held her, and she laid her head on his chest. She could feel his voice buzzing inside his chest, like a bee buzzing within a large flower. She wondered what he was saying to her, or if he was singing to her.

She fell asleep and woke up on her side of the tent. Cyrus seemed to be sleeping, so she crawled outside. Under the stars, she felt slightly intoxicated, as if the arrival of anticipated bad news had freed some part of her. By the light of flameflies, she found Nicodemus's small tent and climbed inside.

He woke with a jerk and tried to crab-walk away.

“Don't be dumb,”
she wrote to him.

He stared at her as if she had just caught fire.

She wrote a small cloud of flameflies that lit the tent with soft incandescence.
“If I never had memories, if I never could hear, than what am I? Some kind of construct?”

He blinked. His long raven hair spilled across his dark shoulders. He wrote:
“Your made of Languag Prime.”

“A Language Prime construct then?”

He frowned.
“All living things are Langauge Prime constructs.”

“But my Language Prime shines too brightly. Maybe Typhon did something to me? Stole something from me?”

He studied her face.
“It's posible.”

“Maybe we can still get my memories and my hearing back.”

His expression softened.

“What?”
she flicked it at him.
“You're looking at me as if I were a puppy caught under a wagon wheel.”

He wrote a golden sentence but then deconstructed it. He wrote another, but then he began to edit it and the thing misspelled into nothing. Then he just frowned down at his hands.

“NICO!”
she shouted at him with a flick of her wrist.
“What under heaven are you thinking?”

He disspelled another sentence and then looked at her helplessly.

“What?”
she repeated.

Tentatively he held out,
“It's not so bad.”

“What's not?”

“Living without part of yourself.”

“I don't know who the God-of-gods damned hell I am!”
She laughed bitterly and then wrote another sentence, “
I don't even know what I am!
”

He wrote,
“To the city, your phisician. To the sick, you're a healer.”
He seemed to think about this and then added,
“To everyone eles, you're a pain in the ass.”

She laughed but then grew somber.
“But can I be a physician if I can't hear?”

He pressed his lips together.
“I know nothing about the practice of medieince, but surely there must be a way.”

“But patients won't be able to tell me their symptoms. I won't be able to hear the coughs or wheezes, their heart sounds.”

He leaned forward.
“You can't be who you were.”

The truth of his statement jolted through her. In the resulting shock, she wanted to cry for what she'd lost and laugh hard at the unfairness and absurdity of it all.

Nicodemus was holding out another sentence:
“But with the strenghts and tallents of what remains, you can do much.”

She pressed both her hands to her cheeks. She'd never felt so strange in her life, as if she wasn't really herself. She laughed and wrote,
“Is this what it's like to be you?”

He smiled.
“Yes, but with fewer handsome heirophants in love with me.”

She laughed, probably louder than she should.
“That's because you don't play hard to get.”

“Then I'll make Izem jealus tomorow by talking only to Cyrus.”

She smiled.
“Will you go back to Avel and keep trying to recover the emerald?”

He nodded.
“I will talk to Shannon first.”

“You will let me come with you to see if the demon stole my memories?”

He nodded and seemed to be studying her face as if it were the most fascinating thing he had ever seen.
“What?”
she wrote.

He sat back, wrote a sentence, and then discarded it. He glanced up at her before writing a second one, which he held out.
“It's odd to see somoene else wonting to recover something lost.”
He paused.
“I both want to help you recover it and stop you from feeling incompleate without it.”
Then he quickly added.
“I'm sorry. I don't know if any of that makes sense. It's is strang for me to see this.”

“Strange for us both,”
she wrote. She wanted to add that their situations were entirely different. Nicodemus had been a cacographer since birth, and
she had only just lost her hearing. Didn't that make them completely different? But some nagging doubt stopped her. In any case, what mattered now was what they had to do next.
“When we go back to Avel, will you let me go to Vivian and DeGarn and try to enlist their help?”

He frowned.

“Heaven aflame, let me at least try! We're getting short on allies, if you hadn't noticed.”

He took a moment to reply.
“Let's discuss it with Shannon.”

“Are you sure you shouldn't go kill the Savanna Walker?”

He looked at her with the gaze that had first revealed to her the frightened boy he had once been. Pity moved through Francesca. Suddenly she had the illogical feeling that if only she could change his pained expression, somehow everything would be all right.

Slowly Nicodemus wrote,
“I can't kill him.”

“Tell me.”

So he wrote about the Walker's nonsensical words, their possible meanings. He wrote of the monster's hatred for those who wanted to make him speak and write logically and how he had killed wizards with misspells in Starhaven. Then Nicodemus explained how he had attacked the Savanna Walker, struck him over and over. He wrote about what it had felt like to put his knee on his cousin's throat and realize that some part of himself had already died.

All of this he wrote in jumbled, misspelled sentences. At first, Francesca was confused by many of his ambiguous words, but then she let it wash over her.

At last Nicodemus sighed.
“May be I shouldve gone with the Walker, let him teech me. Maybe that was my only cance to stop the Disjunction.”

She scowled.

He went on,
“Or mabye I should go back to him. Try to heel him, see if he'll join us against Typhon.”

“Ridiculous!”
she wrote and felt herself make a vocalization of disgust.
“That monster deserves whatever Typhon does to him. If you want to stop Typhon, then you had better not become him.”

Nicodemus's face tensed.
“The Walker said fighting the demon would meen becoming the demon. Deirdre said something similar.”

She thought about this.
“There is a difference between fighting and opposing.”
She gave him a wry look and then smiled.
“You don't always have to tear your opponent into pieces, Nicodemus I'm-a-warrior-of-the-night Weal.”

“That sounds very wise,”
he wrote and frowned.
“Why didn't you start out writing wize things? Or can you wright wise things only after being a pain in the ass?”

“If I were always wise and sympathetic, you'd find me uninteresting.”

He grinned. But when trying to hand a reply to her, he dropped it and with clumsy hands picked it up and cast it to her:
“I'd never find you uninteresting.”

She chuckled at his awkwardness. Her giddiness returned, twice as strong. She felt almost drunk. She wrote,
“Don't be clumsy; you shouldn't be so nervous about flirting with me.

“I wasn't flirting with you,”
he tossed back.

“Not very well you weren't.”

“Magistra, I was only trying to â¦”
she didn't read the rest of the sentence but tossed it away. She made him meet her eyes and then rolled them. Then she wrote,
“If it wouldn't have given me a horrible, incurable disease, I would have taken your hand when you were writing about the Savanna Walker.”

He replied with a sentence, the first word of which was going to translate as
“Magistra.”
So she slapped it into fragments and wrote,
“Let me teach you something about flirting: relax. Call me Francesca or Fran.”

He was once again staring at her as if she had just caught on fire.

She sighed and shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Perhaps she should go. Maybe she was only being foolish, trying to distract herself. She began to write an apology. But just before she was about to cast him the resulting paragraph, one of his golden words floated into her lap.

“Stay.”

She looked up at him. His expression was intent, his green eyes darting all about her face. Suddenly she felt a little frightened.
“All night?”

“As long as you can.”

“What if you roll into me when you're asleep?”

“I'll wrap up in my robes, and when the fireflies burn out, I'll write a wall of Chthonic text.”

She smiled at his earnestness.
“Being too eager frightens a woman off. You're not very good at flirting.”

“I have a horrible teacher.”

She laughed.
“Now you're getting the hang of it.”