Spellwright

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

In a new clay golem, Fellwroth stood on a balcony near the top of the Erasmine Spire.

A squat gargoyle with a monkey’s body and goat’s head sat on the railing. Fellwroth had rewritten the construct to siphon encrypted messages from the wizards’ colaboris spells. The agents of the Disjunction had long ago learned how to tack their texts onto wizardly communications.

So far the goat-faced gargoyle had performed perfectly. In Fellwroth’s hands glowed several golden passages from other important demon-worshipers. “When were these received?”

The gargoyle’s reply was slow and monotone. “Two hours past the dawn bell.”

There were several emerging situations that would sour without attention. Dar in particular was concerning; the demon-worshipers there were becoming increasingly unresponsive. Likely they were hiding something.

“Reply to Dar,” Fellwroth commanded. “They are to expect my arrival within a twelve night. And they are-”

A rat gargoyle with a dog’s ear growing from its back scurried up the railing. Fellwroth smiled. “My newest creation, what have you overheard?”

The stony canine ear flattened against the rat’s back. “Three sentinels came to the gatehouse moments ago,” the small construct squeaked. “They were patrolling the road to Gray’s Crossing. They told the guards they have Nicodemus Weal.”

Fellwroth’s lips curled into a smile. This was expected. The emerald had known Nicodemus was on the move. “Did they say where they are taking him?”

“To the stasis spell in the stables,” the rat replied. “Until a prison cell is chosen.

He nodded. “Very good. Now I want-”

Another of the stone rats scurried onto the ledge. “Noises in the Spindle,” it squeaked.

“What kind of noises?”

The rat began to wash its whiskers. “Scraping noises. Grating noises. Like we make.”

Fellwroth grunted in annoyance. “Remind me to edit your sensitivity. I don’t want to be notified every time you overhear a rat’s nest. But we can deal with that in a moment. For now, all of you back to your functions. I have a Language Prime spellwright to collect.” With that Fellwroth let the clay golem deconstruct.

The world dissolved into blackness as his spirit-which had been animating the golem-leaped into the air and then shot down to Starhaven’s Spirish Quarter. Though subtextualized, Fellwroth needed to avoid even the remotest chance of detection; without a body, a spirit was exceedingly vulnerable.

The spirit floated among the towers to descend into an abandoned alleyway. Earlier that day, Fellwroth had commanded a gargoyle to place a bag of sand there.

The spirit found the bag lying under several weather-worn boards. Inside the sack sat three golem scrolls. The spirit slipped its narrow sentences into the sand and pulled the spells free.

The new body began as a speck of pain that blossomed into a beating heart, a breathing chest, a head, two legs, two arms. The bag split and with a long sigh spilled its excess sand onto the cobblestones.

Fellwroth struggled to sit up in the new, brittle body. Vision was always the last sense a golem acquired. At first the world appeared only as fuzzy blotches.

For this reason Fellwroth always placed a white cloak or sheet near the incarnation site. It was vital to cover a golem with cloth while it was still fresh; otherwise bits of the body would rub off on the surrounding environment.

With some fumbling, Fellwroth found the white cloak. Old tattered boots sat under it.

Once his golem was dressed, Fellwroth trotted off toward the Spirish stables. There was no time to lose.

His vision had returned completely by the time the Spirish stables came into view. The black-robed fools were protecting the place with only four guards-all male, only one with a grand wizard’s hood. In one of the stalls gleamed a silvery Magnus column. That would be the stasis spell holding Nicodemus.

Fellwroth wrote four quick, subtextualized censor spells. “Hold, druid,” the hooded guard called upon seeing Fellwroth’s white robes. “These stables are now out of bounds, we’ve-”

Fellwroth threw a censor spell into the man’s face. The netlike text dug into the man’s mind and set his eyes rolling back as he fainted.

The other three guards called out, but it was too late. Fellwroth caught them with the remaining censor spells.

“Nicodemus Weal,” Fellwroth said with a laugh, and stepped into the stables. “You are not as foolish as I thought.”

The stasis spell manifested itself as a column of slowly rising Magnus passages that entrapped a man as firmly as tree sap imprisoned a bug; something Nicodemus seemed to be discovering. The upward current of sticky words had lifted the boy four feet into the air and was slowly rotating him. Currently a black-robed back faced Fellwroth.

Fellwroth began to write a Numinous disspell down the sand golem’s right leg. “I will edit you from the stasis, boy, so don’t squirm-” He jerked back in shock. “You!”

Staring down with a lopsided smirk was the big male cacographer whose mind Typhon had distorted.

“What is meant by this?” Fellwroth growled.

The big man’s mouth quivered. “Siii… Simple John show himself to north sentinels on road. T-th-they never have see Nico, so they believe John when he says he is Nico.” The big man exhaled as if saying so much exhausted him.

Fellwroth resisted the urge to grind the golem’s sandy teeth. “Don’t waste my time, oaf. If the sentinels come before I have answers, I’ll rip you in half.”

The cacographer started to stutter and struggle, but the stasis text kept the oaf spellbound. Fellwroth waited impatiently for what felt like a quarter hour before speaking. “All right, calm down. I won’t hurt you if you tell me what I need to know.”

The big man swallowed. “Nnnn… Nico sends John as messenger. Nnnn… Nico wants to have proof that red-eyes man is… t-t-telling the truth. Then Nico submit to… submit-t-t… to red-eyes man.” The oaf stopped to pant.

A soft crunch in his jaw filled the golem’s mouth with sand. “Blood and damnation,” he cursed and spat the sand out. He had been unconsciously grinding the golem’s teeth. “So what does the boy want?”

The oaf took a few breaths. “Red-eyes man is to go t-t-to place in Gray’s Town… no, Gray’s Village… no, Gray’s Crowing…”

“Gray’s Crossing,” Fellwroth snarled. “Hurry!”

The cacographer nodded. “Red-eyes-man is to find Mag-g-gister Shannon and is to fix broken person part of Shhhh… Shannon. Nico will be-”

A ratlike gargoyle scurried into the stable. “Fear! Fear! Took too long to reach you. Had to ask other gargoyles where to reach you.”

Fellwroth glared at the construct. “What is it? What did you hear?”

“Fighting in the Spindle!” the thing yelped. “Our protections torn apart! Living body under threat!”

Suddenly the stables rang with loud, hearty laughter.

Fellwroth looked up at the big man’s smiling face. “Fool! So willing to believe in my disability? You truly think I talk that slowly?”

A wordless, animal shriek escaped from Fellwroth’s sandy throat. The monster lashed out with the half-written disspell. But the unfinished text was too dull. It bounced off the stasis spell. Worse, the force of the rebound snapped the sand arm off at the shoulder.

“Weal!” Fellwroth shrieked, “I’ll tear your throat out for this, Weal!”

Fellwroth wrenched his spirit from the sand golem and sent it racing upward toward the Spindle Bridge.

Fellwroth’s true eyes snapped open to see Deirdre. Her rusted greatsword swung up above her head and then flashed downward with all her divine might.

Fellwroth flinched, but the blade came to a clanging halt as it struck the Magnus shield written above the black table.

Light from a hundred flamefly paragraphs illuminated the cavern. Previously Fellwroth had seen the place only in the dark.

The low ceiling sparkled with quartz chips. The cavern widened only a little way into the mountain. The floor was smooth and gray.

Boann’s ark-encased in Numinous-stood at the head of the table. Farther into the mountain, the cavern descended into myriad kobold tunnels. In the other direction loomed the entrance to the Spindle’s tunnel. A patch of starry sky shone through a hole the humans had torn into the tunnel’s roof.

With another screech, Deirdre’s greatsword crashed down onto the textual shield above Fellwroth. A plate-like paragraph buckled under the strain.

Suddenly the world flashed full of golden light, and Fellwroth realized that Shannon was standing beside Deirdre and dashing disspells against the shield. The blue parrot sat on the old linguist’s shoulder.

More terrifying, Nicodemus-standing at the table’s foot-was jamming his fingers into the shield. Blurry rings of misspelled prose radiated out from the whelp’s touch.

Fellwroth bellowed out his rage and terror. The attack had almost worked. If the big oaf had distracted him for a few moments more, the three humans would have broken through his shield and slain his body.

But now his left hand closed around the Emerald of Arahest. With a flash of heat, the gem bestowed the ability to craft infinitely detailed prose without error. When touching the artifact, a spellwright did not fear misspelling even when extemporizing the most complex text.

With a savage yawp, he punched a fist of incendiary Magnus sentences against the protective shield. The spell exploded outward with enough force to knock the three humans onto their backs.

Fellwroth leaped off the table and turned.

The avatar was the first to attack. She launched herself across the stone table and thrust out her greatsword.

Extemporizing through the emerald, Fellwroth wrote a fine Magnus lace and cast it from floor to ceiling.

Deirdre’s sword point stuck into the mesh. The blade snapped a single sentence but then turned. Shock widened the girl’s eyes as a force invisible to her twisted the sword out of her hands. Her body crashed into the mesh. The spell stretched but did not break. She fell awkwardly onto her shoulder.

Fellwroth wrote a thick Magnus chain and tied it around her neck.

Gasping, the woman grabbed the spell and heaved against it. Only the divine strength in her arms kept the text from crushing her neck. But that strength would not last long.

The cave flashed brighter. Fellwroth looked up to see Shannon cast a many-bladed Numinous spell. The parrot on the linguist’s shoulder screamed.

Though impressive for a human text, the spell posed no real threat. With a wave of his hand, Fellwroth extemporized a spray of Numinous disspells that ripped Shannon’s attack into fragments.

Shannon kneeled and slammed his fist against the ground, casting a tundern spell. Like subterranean lightning, the silvery bolt shot through the stone floor. It was meant to erupt into a geyser of crushing sentences. But Fellwroth stamped his foot on the incoming spell and shattered the text as if it were made of glass.

With a short laugh, Fellwroth wrote a thin Magnus net and with a wrist flick cast the thing around Shannon’s stomach. As the spell tightened, the wizard had to turn away to vomit out the logorrhea bywords that had filled his belly.

Through the emerald’s power, Fellwroth could see that the canker curse in the wizard’s stomach had consolidated. That would not do. Fellwroth cast a net of Language Prime that scattered twenty new cankers throughout the old man’s gut.

With another flick, Fellwroth cast a Numinous censor spell around Shannon’s brain. When the text dug into the wizard’s mind, the old man collapsed and left his parrot to flap in short circles.

Something struck Fellwroth’s head. The world spun for a moment but then stopped, leaving only a ringing in his left ear. Some kind of subtextualized censoring spell? Fellwroth turned to see Nicodemus’s face twist with rage. The boy had written several white sentences around an ancient codex and was using them to float the open book beside him.

The whelp must have attempted a censoring spell in a language Fellwroth did not know. “So here you are in all your glory, Nicodemus. The heir to the Imperial family and you’ve got nothing to write but cacographic mush.”

The boy pulled back his right fist as if to make a second attempt. Amused, Fellwroth raised his palm, ready to disspell the boy’s text into nonsense.

But no spell formed in Nicodemus’s hand. The boy lunged forward and slammed his knuckles into Fellwroth’s jaw.

The brief contact with the Nicodemus’s skin showed Fellwroth a glimpse of the boy’s past-a beautiful woman with long brown hair, reading.

Not caring what private memory was now flashing through Nicodemus’s mind, Fellwroth cast a voluminous Magnus wave that knocked the boy back onto the stone table. The boy’s spellbook struck the tabletop and lay open by his hip.

“There shall be no more!” Fellwroth bellowed, and raised the emerald. “Today, Nicodemus Weal, your mind shall be splintered.”

A wafer-thin Numinous paragraph grew from the emerald to become the thinnest of blades. Fellwroth stepped forward and swung the textual sword down.

Desperately, Nicodemus lurched backward but found his hands useless on the slick tabletop.

Fellwroth’s arm flashed through the air, but when the blade was an inch from Nicodemus’s brow, a blast of crimson light burst from Boann’s ark and struck Fellwroth’s hand.

The blow was not strong, but it was enough to pry the emerald from Fellwroth’s pale fingers.

The gem dropped.

The instant Fellwroth lost contact with the emerald, the Numinous blade misspelled into dull sentence fragments that splashed harmlessly into Nicodemus’s face.

“No!” Fellwroth bellowed.

The green stone fell quietly onto the boy’s chest.

In that moment, Fellwroth recognized the emerald’s betrayal: it had somehow told Boann’s ark when and how to pull it free.

The boy’s hand flew up to his chest and closed around the emerald.

AS AMADI AND Kale hurried to the stables in the Spirish Quarter, the secretary explained about Simple John’s appearance and the golem attack.

To Amadi’s profound relief, two of the provost’s officers-the rector and the dean of libraries-followed close behind. They were coming from a closed meeting in which Amadi had tried to explain the events of the past two days to the provost. It had not gone well. Blessedly, Kale had saved her with urgent news.

By the time they reached the stables, two of her sentinels had edited John out of the stasis spell. Though they had censored the big man, they had also sat him down on a stool and brought him a cup of water.

“John,” Amadi said when she stood before the cacographer. “Where are Shannon and Nicodemus?”

He pursed his lips and looked at her with narrowed eyes. “You wouldn’t believe,” he said slowly.

“I know about the golem,” she said curtly. “Blood of Los, but I know about the golem! And I have a day, maybe two, to prove that the creature exists or the provost will censor magical literacy out of my mind.”

The big man thought about this before nodding. “Nico and Magister have gone to attack the golem’s author in the Spindle Bridge.”

Amadi took a long breath. “That’s a long way off. And forming a party will take time.” She stopped. “You said ‘in’ the bridge?”

“Go there,” said John. “You will see what I mean. Only…” He paused. “Only take all your spellwrights… and all your strongest words.”