Authors: Blake Charlton

Spellbound (45 page)

BOOK: Spellbound

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Vivian was the first to turn around, her face tense with surprise. Lotannu turned a moment after, a blaze of silver sentences leaping from his forearms. Unable to see the runes, the other pedestrians paid them no mind.

“It's Francesca,” Francesca called and then cast two golden copies of a sentence that read,
“It's Francesca.”

Both of the wizards caught the spells and read. Lotannu was holding Vivian's hand. He let go to cast,
“Magistra, it is a surprise to see you here.”

“I can say the same. But quickly, come with me. We've a private room in this inn.”

Lotannu exchanged a quick correspondence with Vivian and then cast,
“We?”

“Nicodemus and I. You came to Avel with orders to hunt him down, but I can assure you he is opposed to the demonic forces in Avel. The Savanna Walker attacked you too. He is our mutual enemy. Now you have to see the only way we're going to survive is to form an alliance.”
After casting this to Lotannu, she copied it and cast one to Vivian.

The wizards exchanged a rapid correspondence.

Francesca interrupted.
“At least consider a temporary alliance.”

Vivian responded.
“Magistra, we have learned many things, some of which concern you.”

“I realize that you do not trust me, but give me a chance to explain,”
Francesca replied but then noticed the book Lotannu was holding.
“Is Shannon's ghost still in my journal?”

Vivian nodded, and then asked:
“He is. But first, please tell me why we are corresponding in Numinous and not speaking.”

“I've lost my ability to hear. But we shouldn't be having this conversation here on the street. At least come with me into the inn. I can explain and you can consider my offer.”

The wizards corresponded again, this time for longer. At last, Vivian replied to Francesca:
“Lead the way, Magistra. But at the first sign of treachery, I will personally snuff out your mind.”

ON HIS WAY
to a glover's shop, Nicodemus passed a large caravan guard wearing old brown gauntlets. The idea didn't occur to Nicodemus until the other man was a hundred yards away.

He ran after the guard and flipped him a silver sovereign. Then he offered one more in exchange for his gloves. The guard wanted three more. They settled on two.

Smiling at his luck, Nicodemus hurried back to the inn. The gloves were a bit large and smelled of sweat, but they would do just fine. From the gatehouse, there came a sudden chorus of shouting as if one caravan had tried to enter town when another was leaving. Nicodemus hurried back to the inn. But when he got there, a strange sight brought him up short.

Francesca was on the street, hurrying toward the inn's door. Behind her walked a man and a woman both dressed in nondescript longvests. However, the woman shone with a blaze of Numinous so glorious she looked like a small walking star.

The prose that covered her was more elaborate than any Nicodemus had ever seen, and it was so bright that he could catch only glimpses of her Language Prime texts. Nicodemus could remember only one spell that came close to matching this luminosity: the tirade he had cast against Fellwroth all those years ago in the Spindle Bridge above Starhaven. He had been able to compose that spell only with the help of the emerald.

Francesca cast a short text to both of her followers and then stepped inside the inn. Both the man with long dreadlocks and the woman covered with glorious prose followed.

Nicodemus started as if waking from a trance. The chorus of shouting coming from the gatehouse was growing louder, rising as if the caravans were taking turns bellowing at each other.

Nicodemus shook his head. A strange sensation was moving through his body. There was something about the prose-covered woman that seemed â¦ impressive, certainly, but there was something else. Did she seem â¦ familiar? Was that it?

He ran to the inn's doorway. The starlike woman was halfway across a common room filled with men talking and drinking.

Nicodemus's feet seem to move on their own, carrying him across the room. His hands seemed like someone else's hands as he pulled off his gloves. But the closer he came to the brilliant woman, the more certain he became that he knew her. That she was someone he had known all his life.

Abruptly, the men in the common room fell silent. They turned to face toward the door. Perhaps they had heard the shouting from the gatehouse.

Nicodemus was too focused on the starlike woman to care. She had turned sidewise to slip passed two groups of men, and Nicodemus could see that every strand of her long silky hair was wrapped in ornate text. Even her eyes were covered by a film of opaque prose. She had written a spell to block out all mundane light from her eyes, to blind herself. She looked at him but did not see him. She slipped between the crowds. She was holding the hand of the man with the dreadlocks.

The men in the common room began to murmur in a slow, almost melodic way.

Nicodemus stepped through the crowds until he was a few feet away from the strange woman. They stood in the back of the common room now, just entering the stairs that led up to the second floor. In fact, Francesca was halfway up the stairs.

At last Nicodemus reached the contextualized woman, and with his bare hand he grabbed hers.

He looked down at her fingers. The intricate texts surrounding them bent the light so the knuckles seem knobby, the skin blotchy. But with his cacographic ability, Nicodemus sent a wave of misspelling through this prose so that it evaporated. This left behind the slim and smooth hand of a powerful spellwright barely into her thirties. The olive-brown hue of her skin was the exact same color of his skin.

No cankers grew from where he touched her, so he sent another wave of cacographic influence flying up her arm to her head. The spells that twined around each strand of her hair made them shine silvery white. Now they unwound and fell to the floor, leaving the woman with a long ponytail of glossy raven-black hair.

Then his cacography peeled off the mask she had written over her face, revealing smooth cheeks where once there had been wrinkled impersonations of age.

Finally, Nicodemus's cacography dissolved the blinding textual folds that had made her eyes as pale as milk. Now he looked into irises the same shade of bright green as the Savanna Walker's, the same shade as his own.

This woman â¦ her father had given her a nose shorter than Nicodemus's and a forehead that was longer. But the shape of her face and her mouth, even the way she held her head â¦ it was, Nicodemus realized, the closest he might ever come to seeing their mother.

In her eyes he saw a recognition that surely was reflected in his own. Slowly his lips parted. “Sister,” he said in a slow, stunned whisper. “Halcyon.”

The world slowed until it hung, suspended, on a single moment.

But then time leapt forward, and the Halcyon pulled her hand from Nicodemus's.

In that moment, the crowd of men around them erupted into undulating wails, their mouths forming nonsensical parts of words.

Nicodemus jumped backward as his half sister reached at his throat, her hand a silvery coruscation of lacerating words.

CHAPTER
Forty-six

As Captain Izem brought the
Queen's Lance
around to approach the garden tower, Cyrus frowned at the pass. Half of the usual number of windcatchers were aloft despite the powerful wind.

Izem and he had edited the
Queen's Lance
into her battle conformation: hexagonal hull, piercing forward sails. As such, Cyrus could trot up the hull to grab Izem's arm. “Captain, the windcatchers.”

“I saw. Maybe Oria brought them in case the storm reaches here?”

Cyrus shook his head. “She'd know from scouting kites that the storm will miss her by miles.”

Izem looked back at him. “Let's try the docking lure. Ready the auxiliary aft sail.”

“Yes, captain,” Cyrus said and hurried aft.

As he edited a sail that could double their thrust, Cyrus watched the
Queen's Lance
hover over the tower's jumpdeck. In the marshal's pavilion stood a robed and turbaned hierophant. Not Marshal Oria; she went bareheaded when commanding. From the pavilion's crown unfurled the colored flags that signaled to commence docking.

Izem raised the
Queen's Lance
a few feet and then dipped back down to hover. This holding maneuver would be usual for a larger airship needing to adjust its rigging. But a Kestrel could dock in any conformation. The commander on deck would know this.

Cyrus finished editing the additional aft sail and scanned the skyline for hostile sails. Seeing nothing, he turned back to the deck. The on-tower commander was looking up at them, his posture tense. He must know that they were studying him.

Then the commander made a quick motion. With a cry, they came running out on deck. Maybe twenty pilots, all carrying folds of language-charged cloth.

The
Queen's Lance
could tear any airship to pieces, but against a swarm of kites it could defend itself only by means of a crew casting out sharp side sails. With five pilots aboard they could manage it; however, with only themselves, Izem and Cyrus did not stand a chance against the kites.

“Auxiliary sail!” Izem yelled.

Cyrus grabbed the sail's central passage and cast it into action. The stiff sail folded away from him and let out a blast of wind. The
Queen's Lance
leapt forward even as bright jumpchutes popped open from the deck.

“Midship for the slip!” Izem barked.

Cyrus dove forward. As soon as his belly touched floorboard, he edited the text around him to sew himself into the ship. All around him the
Queen's Lance
folded into a thin, stiff sheet. With the reduced resistance, the warship shot forward into the wind.

Cyrus looked back and saw the round enemy jumpchutes pulling slowly windward. Within moments, the
Queen's Lance
had outflown them and was over the ocean. Cyrus glanced back again and saw half of the kites break north, toward Coldlock Harbor.

Izem banked the
Queen's Lance
north and commanded that the auxiliary sail be taken in. By pulling himself through the cloth, Cyrus obeyed and then hurried forward to Izem.

“The polytheists have taken the garden tower,” the captain said gravely. “Marshal Oria is dead.”

“Or captive?” Cyrus asked hopefully.

“You think she'd let them take her alive?”

Cyrus grimaced under his veil. The first casualty of the Second Civil War was one of the authors he had admired most.

“They'll prevent us from landing at Coldlock,” Izem said with a nod toward the wing of lofting kites flying parallel to them along the coast. “Francesca and Nicodemus are on their own.”

Cyrus looked at the enemy pilots. “How much text do we have left?”

“Enough to return to Lurrikara. We'll join the fleet there.”

As they flew past Coldlock Harbor, Cyrus looked out at the fortress town and prayed to Celeste and the Creator.

FRANCESCA STUMBLED AND had to press one hand against the wall of the stairway. She tried to look at her hand but saw nothing. With a thrill of fear, she realized that tendrils of blindness were moving through her visions.

She looked back to warn her comrades. Lotannu stood not two feet away from her, but he'd turned to look into the common room. Everyone in the crowd was swaying.

A sudden blaze drew Francesca's eyes to a young woman with long black hair; from her right fist extended a profusion of Magnus spells so bright that it had become a silver flare. The woman thrust the wartext at someone whom Francesca could not see. Abruptly, the woman's textual blades winked out and Nicodemus was holding her arm.

“Nico!” Francesca yelled.

Vivian seemed to have disappeared.

The woman who had attacked Nicodemus yanked her hand back. Numinous sentences sprang from every inch of her body and then coiled around her arms. She lunged forward â¦ but her text winked out again.

Nicodemus had stepped forward and embraced the stranger, one hand around her waist, the other pressed flat against her forehead. The woman slammed a fist into his jaw hard enough to make him stumble backward.

Francesca caught a glimpse of the woman's face. Her smooth olive skin was as dark as Nicodemus's, her wide green eyes as bright, her long raven hair the same glossy black.

Golden light flashed before Francesca as Lotannu cast a blazing Numinous spell with an overhand throw. The text shot across the room to wrap around Nicodemus's head. Nicodemus stumbled as the netlike spell enfolded his mind, but it then misspelled into nothing.

Lotannu took off at a run.

“No!” Francesca shouted. “Damn it, no!” She ran after him. Tendrils of blindness twisted across her vision. The Savanna Walker was drawing nearer. “The Walker!”

Nicodemus and the woman were stumbling like dancing drunkards. She threw an elbow at his face, but he pulled her in tighter so she didn't have room to swing.

Then Lotannu reached them and cast a ball of Magnus into Nicodemus's right eye. Nicodemus stumbled backward but held onto the woman. Francesca realized that he was using his cacography to censor her. As soon as he let go, she could tear the room to pieces with her shocking textual strength.

Lotannu reached out again, his arms crackling with Magnus sentences, but Francesca leapt into action. With her left hand, she grabbed a fistful of his dreadlocks; with her right, she brought her own stunning text down on his head. Her golden sentences locked around his mind, and he fell backward, unconscious.

With a cry, Francesca tried to get away from Lotannu, but he fell onto her, and they crashed to the floor. As they fell, whatever text he had been casting detonated.

The blast knocked the breath out of Francesca. Complete blindness washed over her but then relented. She struggled to escape from under Lotannu but then saw Nicodemus. Lotannu's blast had knocked him off his feet. He still held onto the strange woman's hand and was struggling to stand. Then she was above him and pulling hard to escape his grasp.

All around, men had erupted into chaos. Most were rushing toward the
door. Others were fighting with each other. Everyone seemed to be shouting; the Walker had made them aphasic and delirious.

“Stop!” Francesca cried, still struggling to escape Lotannu's weight. “Stop!” But the woman kicked Nicodemus's shoulder to free her hand from his. At last Francesca wriggled out from under Lotannu.

Nicodemus rose to his knees. The strange woman extemporized a Magnus ball and suspended it by a sentence. With both hands and turning her hips to use all the strength in her legs, she swung the textual flail around and smashed its ball into the side of Nicodemus's face.

Francesca leapt at her, but Nicodemus's head snapped to the right, and he collapsed. The woman raised the textual flail over her head, but before she could bring it down, Francesca crashed into her, wrapping her arms around the woman's shoulders and sending them both to the ground.

As Francesca sat up and tried to pin the other woman down, she noticed that the common room had emptied of all but a few men.

Suddenly she was being lifted into the air by a sheet of Magnus. The spell tossed her onto the ground next to Nicodemus and then wrapped around her arms and legs. With a cry, Francesca struggled but found herself hopelessly spellbound.

Nicodemus lay next to her, blood from his head wound flowing freely into his left eye. He was still breathing, and the blood was causing him to blink.

“Nicodemus!”

He turned toward her, his one clear eye trying to focus. His movements were confused. With great effort he sat up. But before him stood the young wizard, her body now gloriously filled with Numinous and Magnus.

Francesca waited for a killing blow to fall on Nicodemus. But it didn't come. She looked up at the blazing woman and realized that the woman was facing away, toward the common room's entrance. Large sections of her sunlike prose vanished.

Another wave of blindness swept over Francesca, followed by a terrifying sense of falling and then spinning. Flashes of the world appeared before her: the woman's beautiful prose, Nicodemus's bleeding face, an impossibly large body made from gray skin infested by burrowing parasitic insects that peered down at them with fleshy white eyes.

The woman's beautiful prose dissolved, and Francesca fell into absolute blindness.

The Savanna Walker had come.

FRANCESCA WOKE WRAPPED in hot and itchy cloth. She also was bent over and something large was jamming itself into her stomach. She tried to moan.

The world turned right side up, and her butt landed on hard ground. The next moment, whatever had been wrapped around her vanished and she was looking up at a slice of evening sky that was framed by two Coldlock Harbor buildings.

Nicodemus squatted next to her. A laceration curved above in front of his left ear. Darkening blood covered his face and shoulders.
“Are yu okay?”
he cast to her.

She looked at herself and patted herself down.
“I'm fine, I think. What happened?”

“Berr,”
Nicodemus replied before looking over his shoulder.
“He came and took the Halycon.”

“The Halcyon?”

“My half sisster. He must have been weighting until I destracted her. Can you walk?”

Francesca got to her feet. She was standing on a large wool blanket, which she supposed was what Nicodemus had wrapped her in before carrying her out of the tavern.

“There's choas at the gates,”
Nicodemus wrote and started off down an alley.
“The watchmen are in a panic. They think the lcyacnthropes caused the afasia. They're searching the town for wolves. But we can hide in the fishermen's quarter.”

Francesca picked up the blanket and found her clinical journal in it. Nicodemus must have taken it from Lotannu when he fled the tavern. She hurried after Nicodemus and wrote,
“Go back to the Halcyon part.”

“It was Vivian. She covered herself with subbtexts more ornate than anything I've ever imageined. She even put laguage in her eyes to make herself blind to the mundane world. An amazing disgise.”

Francesca shook her head.
“But you said your half sister was in a convocation in Ogun.”

“Seams that was a trick. Our agent was fooled.”

“But why disguise herself?”

“Given that she naerly split my head open, I'm guesing she wanted to get close enouf to me to kill me.”

“That would also explain why she didn't fear an encounter with Typhon. She must have known she could defeat him. But how is it the Savanna Walker overpowered her?”

Nicodemus winced as he read this:
“My cacography could cencsor my sister. Berr is also a cacographic Imperial, and he has the quatronary cognition spells Typhon gave him while making him half dragon. Vivian could have defeated any opponent except for Berr.”

“Did Berr harm you?”

He shook his head.
“He beged me too free him. He said his mind would soon be crystalin. I have no idea what he meent.”

Suddenly Francesca remembered the way Nicodemus's head had snapped back from the blow of Vivian's mace.
“I need to look at your wound,”
she flicked at him.
“Did you lose consciousness after the blow?”

He kept moving.
“I did, breifly. Look at it when we're hidden.”

But she stopped and turned around.
“We should go to the infirmary. They will hide us from the watchmen.”

He frowned at her.
“Can we trust the claricks?”

BOOK: Spellbound

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