Spellbound (38 page)

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Authors: Blake Charlton

BOOK: Spellbound
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She had just returned to the bank when something dark rose out of the water. Reflexively, she dropped into a crouch. Her heart began to hammer. She looked back for a sign of danger. But the forest held nothing but ferns and sunlight.
She turned back to the water, expecting to see a strange species of aquatic lycanthrope or some grotesque, living fragment of the Savanna Walker. She saw only Nicodemus, his wet hair pasted down his shoulders, his broad back facing her. As she watched, he waded onto what must have been a sandbank. He sank down and then came up with a fist of sand, with which he started to scrub his armpit.
As he worked, Francesca could see in perfect detail the muscular anatomy of his back—his shoulder's deltoid bunched up as he lifted one arm, the wing of his scapula bone moving smoothly under his olive skin, the broad latissimus muscle that give him a triangle shape.
Francesca stepped closer.
He bent forward to scrub his face. Up out of the water came his lower back, water running down the gentle grove of his spine, the V of his pelvic girdle narrowing to the elevation of his gluteus medius and gluteus maximus muscles that, one stretching over the other, proceeded down under green water to form his buttocks.
He sank down, disappearing under the water. Unexpectedly, she felt no rush of desire, no sudden embarrassment or heightened sexual curiosity.
He was a young healthy male, a study in anatomy, beautiful to her physician's soul the way a bright star was beautiful, beautiful the way the interlocking currents of a river were beautiful.
He came up out of the water and pushed himself into a side stroke. His
long left leg rose through the green to demonstrate the parallel design of the quadriceps muscles. “Nicodemus,” she called out.
The man became a thrash of white water that propelled itself to the opposite bank.
“Nicodemus, it's just me!”
He was now standing in a recess of deep shade, one hand on his chest, ready to pull free some Chthonic wartext and, light permitting, blast her into pulp.
Ignoring this, she picked her way down to the water. When she looked up again, Nicodemus had pressed one hand to his face in exasperation. His lips were moving. She doubted he was saying anything complimentary about her.
His pants were spread across a nearby boulder. She looked up at him and motioned for him to come closer.
He frowned but sank into the water and made a creditable breast stroke to her. She forged a sentence that would read,
“Could you bear to correspond with me for a moment?”
She grinned, wondering if he'd catch the play on “bare.”
But as the golden sentence floated away from her, Nicodemus waded to his right so it wouldn't touch him. The spell floated halfway across the water before sinking below the surface and disappearing into the green. Francesca looked at him. He shook his head. She wrote and cast,
“What's the matter?”
But again, he sidestepped the question.
“Nicodemus!” she scolded. “Please?”
He looked at her and shook his head.
She met his eyes. “I'm deaf.”
His expression softened. His shoulders rose and fell. He waved toward himself in a gesture that might mean “come here” or “let me have it.”
She wrote out.
“Why are you so afraid of corresponding?”
and sent it floating to him.
He plucked the sentence from the air. Instantly, the runes began rearranging. He wasn't even trying to translate it. Rather, he looked at her with a face that might have been ashamed but was perhaps only pained. He held the now nonsensical sentence out to her: “This is why,” he was saying in the language of gesture. Abruptly the golden sentence tore itself into nothing.
His cacography. He could make it powerfully disruptive or slow it down. But he could not stop it.
“Try!” she said out loud.
He shook his head.
“Please. Try,” she said. “I'm deaf.”
He held out both his hands, palms up.
“G'ahh!” she groaned. “Try!” she repeated and then looked around for anything that could force his hand.
Her eyes fell on his pants.
She looked back at him just as he looked back at her.
She grinned. He moved his lips, clearly saying, “Don't—”
But she was off, bounding over the rocks until she scooped up his pants.
He was only a few strokes away, but he could not grab her foot or pull her into the water without giving her a canker curse. So she nimbly climbed up the shady ledge, giggling.
Nicodemus was still waist deep in lake water. His lips were moving fast, and she would have paid a year's wages to know what he was saying. She managed to stop laughing long enough to yell out, “Try!” He looked to still be swearing, so she yelled again, “Try!”
He only looked at her.
“Try, or come and get these.” She shook his pants.
He glared.
Only with supreme control could she keep from laughing.
He glared for a while longer but then wrote a small golden spell and threw it up to her.
Gleefully, she translated it to “
I hate yu
” and then exploded into laughter.
She replied:
“Bet you say that to all the girls who leave you naked in a lake.”
After catching the reply, he had to rush to translate it before it misspelled. Even with his full concentration, the text crumbled into golden dust. At last he tossed up an answer:
“I tryed. Give my close back.”
She smiled at the misspellings but knew better than to mock them … yet. She wrote to him:
“This isn't so bad, is it?”
“Yehs, it is!”
“Promise me you'll keep corresponding.”
“NO!”
“Otherwise, you won't get your pants.”
“I hate yu.”
She giggled again and was about to reply when Nicodemus looked up at the sky. She followed his gaze and saw what she at first mistook for a giant white seagull. Then the long, slim lines declared the object to be the
Queen's Lance
. It shot overhead, flying straight for their old camp. She looked down to see Nicodemus climbing up out of the water.
Francesca was a physician, and she was also a curious woman. Had Nicodemus been any other man, she would have looked, perhaps only for a discreet moment, at his penis. But, because of the tribulations she had already put him through, she averted her eyes. Given that he had just been
standing in cold water, doing so was probably denying herself a source of teasing that would have lasted her for the next hundred years.
When Nicodemus reached the ledge, she began to offer his pants to him.
But he peeled some skinspell off his left arm and cast it with a backhand motion. She tried to jump away but found herself already spellbound. Apparently, the deep shadow was dark enough for his skinspells to function.
The pants flew from her hands to Nicodemus's. He never even looked at her. After hopping into his pants, he jogged off toward the camp. A moment later, Francesca's bonds dissolved. Still laughing, she ran after.
Francesca had always thought of airships as flying boats. She had imagined hierophants dashing around like sailors on cloth hulls, hoisting halyards or adjusting sails or doing whatever it was pilots did. This belief had been reinforced by the few airships she had seen docking, their crews climbing over their vessels, preparing to collapse their giant constructs into stacks of cloth.
However when, using Magister Shannon to translate her Numinous sentences, she told Cyrus about her conception of airships, he laughed. “Once at altitude,” he said, “the
Queen's Lance
will be very different.” Francesca watched as he cast hierophantic spells into her robes that caused them to weave their cotton threads into the airship's silk. While tying a turban and veil onto her, Cyrus explained via Shannon that, unless a warship flew slowly, its pilots didn't walk on the vessel; they wore it like a garment.
Francesca didn't understand. The
Queen's Lance
looked as she always had: a hexagonal hull with bladelike wings. Francesca was now sewn into that hull as tight as a button, but that didn't make the ship a garment.
Then they set sail and Francesca discovered—while trying to scream her lungs inside out—that the airship could fold around her like a massive, demon-possessed bedsheet and yank her through the air with such velocity that she felt like her major internal organs had been mashed into paste.
Fortunately, once the
Queen's Lance
rose high enough that she could see the ocean to the west, the warship changed its conformation to become a single wing that was wider than any two market squares. Francesca, no longer screaming, was now woven into the ship in a facedown ordination. Looking up, she found an open space had been left so she could raise her head above the upper surface. Amazingly, the entire warship had become as thin as a sheet of paper.
She lowered her head to the underside. Below her stretched five thousand feet of liquid air and then the rolling savanna. She had been holding her arms against her chest, but now she let them hang in the wind.
She looked forward for Cyrus and the other pilots and saw their
cloth-wrapped forms moving within the wing. The pilots were now suspended in their magical language. It allowed them to swim through woven threads like fish through water.
Looking to her right, she was surprised to see a tremendously fat hierophant not two feet from her. Then, realizing who this was, she laughed.
Getting Nicodemus aboard the warship had proved more difficult than anticipated. As soon as his skin had touched the airship, the nearby text had misspelled and fallen out of the silk. If this happened when aloft, the crew would spend the rest of their lives experimenting with screaming as a method of preventing death by high-velocity impact with the ground. Experimentation would have been brief, the results disheartening.
To prevent this scenario with some textual insulation, Cyrus and Izem had wrapped Nicodemus with so much cloth that he resembled a giant baby swaddled by an overly zealous goddess of motherhood. Francesca wrote Nicodemus a message:
“I know you were uncomfortable when I saw you naked, but this is overdoing it with the cloths just a bit, don't you think?”
Cyrus had left the fingers of Nicodemus's right hand unbound so he could free himself in an emergency. He used the exposed digits to take Francesca's sentence and translated it. After a moment, he handed it back to her. Wondering if he had written a new message, she reached out. But the text misspelled and blasted itself into sentence fragments. Francesca jerked back, crying out in alarm.
When she looked back, Nicodemus had tilted his head forward so that he could look up at her. Even though she could see only his eyes, she recognized the expression as one of exasperation.
She wrote a sentence, translated it, and held it out to him. Being translated, it could not leave her hand without falling apart. It read:
“You're childish and irksome!”
He gently touched it with an outstretched finger. The “c,” “
ildish
,” and “
irk
” misspelled and then fell out of the sentence. The line contracted, and she was left holding
“You're handsome!”
Snorting, she flicked the sentence away.
Nicodemus held out another sentence.
“Stop, your making me blush.”
Rolling her eyes, she replied:
“You've a high opinion of yourself.”
“You rote it.”
“You misspelled what I wrote.”
“I just removed the leters you accidently put in.”
“Don't be retarded.”
“That's like asking you not to be superselious.”
“That's supercilious.”
“Now its ironic.”
“What's ironic?”
“You were just being superselious.”
“Supercilious!”
“I'm pretty sure its irony because you don't now your being superselious.”
“FLAMING HEAVEN, it's super-ci-lious!”
“That same sound could be made by ‘se.'”
“Sound doesn't exist for me anymore.”
“Then why under heaven are you correcting me?”
“It can't be spelled that way.”
“It can be pronounced that way.”
“Words aren't their sounds. I understand words, but I don't understand sound.”
“Word's aren't there spelling. I understand words but I don't understand spellings.”
He seemed to be searching her eyes. She wrote a reply:
“You think you're handsome.”
After reading this, his head bobbed and his chest shook, the very vision of laughter. She rolled her eyes, but he didn't notice. At last, he handed her a reply. She took it and read:
“Hansom to whom, a bunch of kobolds? I don't know if you've resaerched their females, but I'm exactly for breasts shy of qualiffying as a looker to any of my students.”
“
!
” she flicked back.
“4?”
He shrugged.
Under her veil, she chewed her lip for a moment then replied:
“Some people are born with third nipples, which are always on the same vertical line as the two expected nipples. Sometimes there is even breast tissue under the accessory nipple. In fact, any mole or dark spot you find on the same vertical line as your nipples—all the way down to your pelvis—is probably an uncompleted third nipple.”
Nicodemus took the paragraph and translated it, but it fell apart before he could finish. He looked at her with eyes that seemed ashamed.
Francesca felt a little foolish. Physiological trivia was hardly important to their task. Was there anything in that last sentence that he really needed to know? Damn sure there was. She handed him one sentence:
“Any mole you find directly below your nipples is probably an uncompleted third nipple.”
He patted his chest and abdomen with exaggerated movements.
She smiled.
He handed her a sentence:
“We're suposed to be looking for the Svanna Walker.”
She looked down at the grassland rolling out to the horizon. She handed a sentence back to him:
“You said the monster would run to an oasis.”
He shrugged.
“All living things in the savanna must find watter.”
A moment later he added,
“I don't like coresponding with you.”
She was taken aback.
“Why not?”
“I don't like youre seeing my misspellings.”
Only with great effort did she refrain from commenting on how he spelled “youre.”
“You don't misspell all that badly.”
“It's not niece to lie to the retarded.”
“All right! All right! I'm sorry! I won't use the word ‘retarded' anymore, okay?”
“It's embarasing to misspel in front of a pretty woman.”
“It's not nice to lie to plain looking women.”
“I'm not lying.”
“How would you know, you've spent the last decade with kobolds?”
“So you don't have 4 breasts?”
She sighed in exasperation, even though she was smiling.
“You're being childish and irksome again.”
He reached out, likely trying to again misspell her sentence into a compliment. Laughing, she jerked her hand back. But as he reached farther, a shiver moved through her as she imagined what would happen if he accidently touched her. She dropped the sentence, and it tumbled away in the wind.
Seeming to sense her fear, he withdrew his hand and looked back to the savanna. She did as well and saw amid the grass a dark circle. An oasis? Broad, squat oak trees grew around it. Nicodemus held out a sentence:
“The Walker passed thought their.”
“How can you tell?”
He pointed at something.
“The katabeast body on the bank.”
Francesca squinted. She could indeed see something ragged on the water's edge. Then, grimacing, she realized that the water around that something was tinged red.
Nicodemus handed her another sentence.
“That sould be covered with gorging lycanthropes. Or at least smaller preditors.”
“The Walker is keeping them away?”
“Kept them away but nocking out every beest's ability to smell for miles.”
“How do you know he's not still down there?”
“Do you see nothing down their?”
She frowned at him before replying.
“If you're going to start with the puns again, cut me free so I won't have to endure the pain.”
“Do you see nothing? As in do you see a blind spot?”
Then Francesca understood. If the monster were down there, some part of the oasis would appear as nothing. Francesca had never looked for a blind spot before and wondered if it was even possible to “see” blindness.
But after moving her gaze across every square foot of the oasis and the surrounding grass, she realized that she had just looked for blindness. She handed Nicodemus a sentence:
“You're right. The monster's not down there.”
“He's heding for the Greenwater.”
After handing her this, Nicodemus looked forward, and his head bobbed as if he were yelling. One of the hierophants moved toward them.
“
Greenwater?
” Francesca asked.
“A spirng-fed oases north of here. Once the trianing ground for lycanthrope spellrights. The empire destroyed it. There are still metespells moving throu the place.”
Just then, Francesca realized that the pilot coming toward them was Cyrus. He was upside down relative to her—his belly pressed against the airship. He was moving across the silk by reaching forward and sinking his fingers into the fabric and then pulling himself along. He stopped a few feet before Nicodemus. The two men seemed to yell back and forth. Nicodemus pointed to the oasis and the dead katabeast. After a while, Cyrus pulled himself back toward the ship's nose. The ship turned north.
Francesca handed Nicodemus a question:
“Are you able to see the Savanna Walker?”
“I can. His texts misspell when they touch my skin, so they have little affect win they reach my brain. Best he can do is make his image blurry. But now wen I spek his name, even that fails.”
“What does he look like?”
Nicodemus shrugged.
“Like a man.”
She threw “
Lies!
” at him so fast he dropped it and it went tumbling into the air. She was about to describe the nightmare monster she had seen when Nicodemus held out a paragraph.
“Thou he looks like a man to me, he's still draconic, still an incomprehensibel mosnter. He can incorperate other bodies into his own. Make himself half-horse and then grafts human arms onto that horse. Or when he wants wait, he'll put himself into a katabeast's body and add the torsos of his devotees. Whatever he comes up with, it's always grewsome and he makes them seam more so by distorting your parceptions. But underneath all that, his own body is just that of an old man with blotchy skin and missing teeth.”
Francesca thought about this.
“Who was he before he became this thing? And, is he still a man if he's also half a dragon?”

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