Spellbound (48 page)

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Authors: Blake Charlton

BOOK: Spellbound
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Francesca's rage at her author flared hot. Glaring at the ghostly prose in her arms, she vowed that she would not become a reincarnation of her ghost or her ghost's author. Though Typhon had written her from these women, she was not either of them any more than a vase was the clay from which it had been fired. And just as a vase was not the hands of the sculptor who shaped it, she was not Typhon.
Francesca went to the bed and sat beside Nicodemus. She watched the sound of his breath, now ebbing from bright white to dull gray.
She laid her hand on his bare shoulder. Instantly, a translucent golden replica of her arm rose out of her arm; her ghost was trying to escape her lover's cacographic touch. But Francesca forged barbed sentences within her every limb, trapping the ghost within her.
She placed her other hand on Nicodemus's shoulder and felt her ghost writhe. From her hand rose tendrils of sparklike Numinous fragments as the ghost's arm misspelled. A central passage gave way, and the visual world disappeared into a cloud of runes that floated about her for a moment like vaporized gold.
Francesca's ghost was no more; she had deconstructed the text from which she had been made.
Nicodemus stirred in his sleep. She brushed the hair back on the right side of his face and thought about what she had been written to do and what she and Nicodemus could no longer be.
She brushed his hair back again and then froze. Something strange happened to her perception of time when she touched her lover: the landscape of the future changed. Experimentally, she touched his shoulder. Once more the courses she might take into the future shifted. Suddenly she understood, and an idea flashed through her mind.
Holding onto Nicodemus's shoulder, she sent her augmented mind racing forward to assemble a last, desperate course of action.
 
WHEN FRANCESCA HAD finished devising her plan, she pressed her lips to Nicodemus's. Sleepily, he smiled like a man satisfied with himself and wrapped his arm around her, trying to pull her on top of him.
She kissed him while pressing his chest away. He hitched a playful half smile at her and pulled more insistently.
She shook her head. “Lover,” she whispered and saw the word as two bright notes:
lov-
bright green,
-er
pale yellow. With enough time she would learn what colors corresponded to what notes, what shades to what timbres, what brightness to what loudness. In time she would learn to hear and speak again, after a fashion. But now she still needed to write. Into his hand she pressed a sentence:
“Lover, I need you to wake now.”
He held the text and blinked at it. When it started to misspell, she touched it, correcting the letters. He looked at her and sat up.
“Is something rong?”
She took his hand.
“Something happened last night.”
He laughed bright red and began to write something.
She stopped him.
“Yes, that happened too. But something more, something about why my Language Prime text shines so brightly.”
She had his full attention now.
“I was written for you.”
His face tensed.
“You're a consturct?”
“In many ways, yes. That is why your touch does not give me a canker curse. It is also why I resemble your old governess.”
“April?”
She nodded.
“Fellwroth saw an image of April when you struck him back in the Spindle Bridge. So did Typhon when you touched him? Knowing that image, Typhon chose my ghost as the one most resembling her, to seduce you.”
Nicodemus was shaking his head.
“You can't be a construct. You're made out of Langauge Prime; you're aliv.”
She squeezed his hand.
“I don't have all the answers for you now but I will soon. I must go before the first dragon can get away.”
“The first dragin? Fran, what's hapening? Do you serve the Disjunction?”
She kissed a sentence onto his hand.
“I was created by the Disjunction just as you were. But I have a plan. Will you trust me and do exactly as I say?”
She met his gaze.
Without looking away he wrote:
“Without hesitateion.”
She was about to continue when something struck her as odd.
“Wait,
what do you mean ‘without hesitation?'”
she flicked at him.
“Don't turn into a romantic soft brain because you finally got my clothes off.”
He made a wry face.
“Weren't you written to seduse me?”
“Pftt,” she said. A puffy white sound.
“You can't seduce a man who looks at you like you're a side of meat.”
He exhaled as if annoyed but then smiled.
“Well, you've convinced me Typhon's writen you; I can't imagin what other than a demonic craetion could be so exasparating.”
She kissed him, hard.
He smiled and then put his back against the wall, and she leaned into him.
“When I was in the solareium on the table,”
he wrote on the anterior portion of her forearm,
“you thought I'd misspell you. You stopped my bleding thinking you would dye. Or have I misunderstood?”
She looked up at him.
“You understood.”
“Then I trust you.”
“Even though I was written by Typhon?”
His green eyes studied hers for a long time.
“What are yu goinng to do?”
“Use what I know about the second dragon to threaten Typhon's plan.”
“The second dragan?”
She nodded.
“I can't explain. For my plan to work, you must confront Typhon ignorant of what I will do. Typhon will search your thoughts before he gives you the emerald. You can't know what is going to happen.”
“The demon will give me the emereld? Fran, what if you're rong?”
“We both become Typhon's slaves,”
she wrote.
“We'll be together.”
He made a wry face.
“As much as I addmire you, and as wonderful as the sex was, isn't it a littel early to start talking about eternil bondage?”
She snickered.
“I didn't mention marriage, only enslavement by a demon.”
Then she made her expression serious.
“Mark carefully what I write next.”
He nodded.
She wrote out a long paragraph in her forearm and then edited it briefly before handing it over.
“Take my clinical journal and the ghost within it to your camp. Reunite Shannon with his ghost, who was not edited by Typhon. Leave the journal with the kobolds and make sure they keep it safe; Lotannu made a copy of Typhon's research spell in the back of it. Then hurry to the colaboris station in Avel and find Magister DeGarn. Promise to pledge yourself to the League of Starfall if he places all of his authors—wizards, druids, and highsmiths—under your command. Order them to protect you. Then take them to the sanctuary. The doors will be open and a guard will be waiting for you. When you are brought
before Typhon, agree to ANYTHING he asks so long as he will give you the emerald.”
As Nicodemus read this, the words kept misspelling, and Francesca was obliged to touch the paragraph to reverse his cacographic influence.
When finished, Nicodemus looked up.
“Fran, I'm not going to join the Disjuncteion.”
She nodded vigorously.
“You are if you want to have a hope of escaping enslavement, not to mention freeing me from his bonds.”
“I cann't!”
“You can and you will. Typhon is going to say horrible things about me. He is going to accuse me of deceiving you. But after I touched you everything changed. I haven't told you everything. I can't tell you everything! But you must promise to trust me and you must promise to agree to anything—and I mean anything—Typhon asks you to do. Promise me!”
He looked from the paragraph up to her and shook his head.
“I can't pleadge myself to the Disjunction.”
“Gahhh!” she said in exasperation. Then she grabbed one of his hands and mashed into it the word
“GodofgodsDAMNITNICO!”
When he looked up, she shook his shoulders and then—only a little more gently—pressed a run-on sentence into his hand:
“I'm so infatuated with you now and so intolerably happy that we made love that I am an inch away from absurdly, idiotically, gratuitously falling for you if I don't BLOODY KILL YOU FIRST because you want to commit suicide by refusing to lie to a GOD-OF-GODS DAMNED DEMON!”
When he finished, she grabbed him and, using her tongue, kissed
“!!!”
into his mouth.
He took the exclamation points off of his lips and laughed red. Then he took her hand.
“Promise you'll do what I say,”
she wrote for him and gave him her most pleading look.
“Trust me.”
He closed his eyes and exhaled.
“I promis.”
She kissed him again. Then she dressed, gathering up her things, and ran out the door. In a few hours everything would change.
 
CYRUS WOKE IN the near dark of a barracks. It took him a moment to remember the previous night. He and Izem had flown the
Queen's Lance
all the way back to Lurrikara in the dark, running into a rainstorm a hundred miles away from the island.
Night landings were difficult in the best of times—pilots had to use the flags of linguistically charged cloth as markers—and in the blowing rain it had seemed like suicide. But with no option other than ditching the
Queen's Lance
in the ocean, Izem and he had laboriously gone through the protocols and docked the warship just before midnight.
Near delirious with fatigue, he and Izem had collapsed into beds the moment they were dry. Cyrus had slept like a stone, but now he was sitting up and rubbing his eyes. The sun couldn't be all the way up yet.
“Time to be out of bed, pilot,” Izem said from the door. “Word just came down from the jumpdeck. The storm has passed. The whole fleet is going aloft.”
Cyrus pressed both hands to his face. “Wonderful,” he said flatly. He thought of Francesca in Coldlock Harbor and hoped she was safe.
Izem grunted. “In an hour, we begin the Second Siege of Avel.”
Midmorning sunlight slanted through the redwood forest as Nicodemus rode through ferns and into the makeshift camp his students had erected. Vein was the first to emerge from his tent, blinking sleepily in the daylight. Francesca's shunting spell had been removed from the kobold's chest. He appeared healthy but moved gingerly. Nicodemus dismounted and carefully embraced him. A few moments later, Flint and Jasp came out of their tents.
As Nicodemus greeted each student, his heart ached. Of the fifteen young kobolds he had led out of the Pinnacle Mountains, only these three were still alive.
Vein reported that little had happened in the camp: Shannon seemed weaker than ever, but the three survivors were healthy and eager to seek revenge against the Savanna Walker and Typhon. Nicodemus shook his head and said that he needed them to stay in the forest to protect Shannon and an invaluable book he had brought back.
Quickly Nicodemus described all that had happened since he had left on the
Queen's Lance.
The kobolds listened carefully. Jasp petitioned to accompany him into Avel, but Nicodemus refused.
“If I succeed in the city,” he said in the kobolds' language, “I will return to you in a few days. If I do not … make Shannon comfortable until his time comes and then return to your families in the mountains knowing you fought the demon with bravery and honor.”
Jasp looked as if he wanted to deny the possibility that Nicodemus might not return, but the two older kobolds nodded and agreed. Nicodemus removed one of the saddlebags from his horse and asked where Shannon was. Vein pointed to one of the tents.
Inside, Nicodemus found the old man lying on a blanket, his face slack and his mouth hanging open. “Magister!” Nicodemus said, suddenly afraid Shannon was dead.
The old man jerked and snorted. He opened his white eyes and blinked. Azure, who had been napping on a nearby perch, made a few plaintive squawks.
Nicodemus exhaled. “Creator! You scared me, Magister.”
“Nicodemus?” the old man said as he struggled to sit up. “So you didn't die out on the savanna.”
Nicodemus sat down beside the old man. “No, Magister,” he said. “No, I didn't die, but it wasn't for lack of trying.”
The old man rubbed his eyes. “I don't doubt it. So, was it worth it? Did you catch the Savanna Walker?”
“We recovered your ghost.”
Shannon turned his head sharply. He didn't look at Nicodemus. He didn't blink. He didn't even seem to breathe. “What did you say?”
“We've recovered your ghost.”
Shannon looked at the book Nicodemus was withdrawing from his bag. “In … there?”
“Yes. Here, let me open—”
“No,” the old man said quickly. “No. No, not yet. Tell me.” He licked his lips. “Tell me everything.”
The story tumbled out of Nicodemus: the Savanna Walker as James Berr, Vivian Niyol as the Halcyon, Francesca DeVega as a mystery. He explained about his head wound and how she had touched him without suffering a canker curse. He described her revelation and discovery of Typhon's two hidden dragons.
“She is your lover,” Shannon said in an objective tone.
It wasn't a question. Heat flushed across Nicodemus's face.
“It's your voice,” Shannon said. “I can hear it. And I don't know what to tell you. But how do you know my ghost hasn't been rewritten by Typhon?”
“Francesca,” was all Nicodemus could think to say. “She said it wasn't.”
“She might be some new kind of golem, some kind of body animated by a textual consciousness and then imbued with Language Prime to fool you.”
Nicodemus didn't reply.
“You can't trust her.”
“When I was dying on her table, she sacrificed herself for me.”
“Maybe she was written to do so. Maybe she doesn't have free will.” Nicodemus said nothing.
“Creator, save us,” Shannon muttered in irritation. “You think you're in love with her.”
“I'm not some glassy-eyed boy, Magister. Deirdre found evidence that Francesca could stop the second dragon.”
“You don't truly know who she is. She doesn't know who she is.”
Noticing that the old man hadn't taken his eyes off of the journal, Nicodemus raised the book. “So, do you want to be reunited with your ghost, or not?”
Shannon's eyes followed the book as a starving man's might follow a loaf of bread. “I do,” he said in a near whisper. “Nico, since you left my health has worsened rapidly. When I try to …” He paused and looked toward Nicodemus. Clearly working up to something. “Maybe I can't say; it's too embarrassing. But … see how pale I've become?” He tapped a frail hand to his cheek, and Nicodemus saw he was indeed frighteningly wan.
“Magister, Francesca believes the demon will give me the emerald—”
“Even if you were holding the emerald in your hand this instant, I don't think you could give me much time. As it is, I might have a handful of days or only one.”
Nicodemus tried to speak, but the old man held up his hand. “You are going to go running off again. Off to meet Francesca in the sanctuary?”
“Magister, Deirdre sent Francesca to us. I have to—”
“You must do what you must,” the old man said, but then his tone softened. “The Creator knows I had to leave others behind in my life.”
Nicodemus knew the old man was thinking of the wife and son he had been forced to leave in Astrophell years ago.
Shannon nodded. “If you must go, Nicodemus, you must. But leave me the journal. Whether the demon rewrote it or not, the ghost will be my solace at the end.”
“Magister, I'm not abandoning you. I will return.”
“Creator send that you are right, my boy. Please, Creator, may you be right.”
Nicodemus started to say something but stopped. He tried again but stopped. At last, he put the journal down beside Shannon. “I will be thinking of you, Magister.”
Blindly, Shannon reached out his hand. Nicodemus knew that the old man did not mean to touch him, could not touch him. Nicodemus held his own hand out, inches away from Shannon's. It wasn't much of a gesture, but it was the only one they had. “My thoughts will be with you too, my boy,” the old man said.
Nicodemus stood and was about to go when Shannon spoke again. “Remember, you're not facing an opponent who wants to tear you to pieces as Fellwroth did. Typhon is far more subtle. He may not be trying to capture you as much as captivate you.” Shannon looked at the journal. “With this ghost, he may be doing the same to me.”
Nicodemus shifted his weight.
The old man was silent for a long moment before he said. “Nicodemus, we may have committed our lives by falling in love with fictions.” He paused. “Be careful, my boy.”
“I will be,” Nicodemus said and turned away. As he left the tent, his mind raced with thoughts of Shannon and his ghost, Francesca and her demonic author.
 
FOR THE FIRST
time, the ghost was aware he was about to be pulled out of the book. Only parts of his paginated intellect were connecting. It was happening slowly, as if someone were opening the cover hesitantly. A few more pages connected; he regained an intuitive knowledge of how to walk. A few more pages, and his ability to recognize and remember faces improved.
It made him impatient until it made him apprehensive. Who was opening the cover so slowly?
At last, his intellect gained enough interconnection that a textual instinct pulled him out of the book.
The ghost stood inside a canvas tent, a wash of sunlight was moving on the wall. What, he wondered, had happened to Magistra Niyol's plans that they should be reduced to camping? He turned to ask Magistra or Lotannu what had happened when he saw himself, his author.
The ghost's first reaction was terror. He stepped back, fearing that Shannon would hurl a disspell or that Nicodemus would come charging through the tent wall.
But there was only the sound of wind in redwoods.
His author was lying on a bedroll, his beard wiry, dreadlocks pulled back from a skeletal face. But his eyes … his blank white eyes were staring at him with anxiety and anticipation.
The ghost's fear dissolved and he looked down and realized that his textual body was dim as the light from a Dralish lightning bug. His right arm had been deconstructed, and the passages around its end were beginning to fray.
He looked back at his author, at himself. “Shannon,” his author whispered, “how did we get so old?”
The ghost smiled wanly and held out his hand. With a fine tremble, his author reached out, and they coincided. A wave of golden runes rode up the ghost's arm and across his body. Slowly, he got on his knees and then lay down into his author.
Unlike their previous meeting in the sanctuary, the author did not withhold himself, and so the two came to know each other perfectly. They became each other, and in doing so learned more acutely of their frailty, of the growing cankers in their gut, of their steady blood loss into their intestines.
This far from a necropolis, neither spellwright nor ghost would survive much longer.
Outside, the wind grew stronger in the redwoods. The sound of footsteps on forest floor. The now-distant voice of Nicodemus, their former student.
There was bittersweet comfort in it all. The two versions of Shannon—textual and physical, creator and created—were reunited; it made existence a fine thing, the simple beauty of light and shadow playing on the tent canvas, their shared memories of the world beyond. It was a sharp feeling, knowing that soon they would have to leave it behind.
 
THE SUN REACHED its zenith as Francesca, her mind and body now fully realized, stepped into the sanctuary. She had made sure that none of the guards or clerks could see her as she walked to the Hall of Ambassadors.
She found Typhon's large alabaster body sitting on the redwood throne. To his left stood Canonist Cala. To the right crouched James Berr. The Savanna Walker had changed, perhaps for the last time. His present form, massive and sleek, was the body of a voyager, a killer, a terror. Berr's skin shone pearly white and was covered by wavy iridescent rainbows. He pulled back wide lips to reveal fangs long as knives.
Francesca ignored him and turned her attention to her author. He looked at her with a smile that seemed both pleased and sad. She wondered how far into the future the demon could construct the landscape of time.
Typhon stood and bowed. He wrote her a short golden passage and tossed it to her.
“Welcome back to us, daughter. Truly, we have a bounty of success that was unforeseen.”
She sniffed.
“That might be because you have all the foresight that the Creator gave to muddy shoe leather,”
she wrote to Typhon before glaring at Berr.
“You will have to choose between your successes.”
Typhon looked at Berr and then at her.
“Nicodemus is yours now?”
She nodded.
“Completely?”
“He will be here shortly.”
The demon narrowed his onyx eyes.
“How far into time can you perceive?”
She gave him her brashest grin.
“Far enough.”
He studied her.
“I never imagined it possible for both dragons to manifest.”
“It seems I have another cause to compare you to muddy shoe leather, this time concerning imagination.”
She looked at Berr, who bared his teeth. Her smile broadened, and she took a threatening step toward him. Berr flinched.
“Daughter,”
Typhon wrote,
“I cannot choose between my creations.”
“Then I'll choose for you.”
Typhon stepped down from the throne and walked toward her.
She leaned forward.
“Don't.”
The demon stopped; his expression was earnest, almost pleading.
“Look far into the potential futures. You cannot predict what Los will be like. I can change that.”
“It would be lovely if you could signal when you're trying to be impressive or threatening, because as it is now I'm not getting it. Perhaps you could raise your hand?”
The demon brought a hand to his chest.
“Daughter, please, do not resist.”
Up to this point, Cala might have been a statue. But now she looked at Francesca with keen interest. The demigoddess seemed to be trying to say something with her eyes.
Francesca ignored her.

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