Spellbreaker (3 page)

Neither the smuggler nor Dhrun had noticed any change in Leandra. No doubt this was because of a side effect of Leandra's current condition. When her disease flared, Leandra caused those nearby to better understand any language with which she was working. Fortunately an increased awareness of the red language had made the two men more preoccupied with the text around the smuggler's brow.

Leandra wanted to know more about how the godspell around her head had been created. The imperial spellwright who had edited it had shaped the text so that it would project a human mind forward by one hour, but in the flare of her disease Leandra was less human, more textual.

Carefully she misspelled one word in the godspell's first sentence and so increased her perception twenty-four times farther into the future. No other mortal creature but she could have made this misspelling, not even her illustrious father.

Normally Leandra would have been proud of such an achievement, but now she felt nothing but overwhelmed by the newly perceptible future selves. If she had thought the next hour contained a multiplicity of futures, the next day produced a million times as many, a hundred million times as many.

She swayed, struggling to retain her sanity amid the prismatic spray of herselves. In the past her hybrid-mind had been prone to dangerous expansions of perception, but nothing so dangerous as this had ever happened before. Now only one thing saved her from madness. Only one thing allowed her to grab the table with both hands as if she were drunk.

A little less than a third of her future selves were wracked by a specific guilt. Though Leandra had never felt it before, she recognized the dreadful emotion as that belonging to someone who had recently killed a dear friend, a family member, or a lover.

Another third of her future selves were filled with the anxieties of someone fleeing danger and wracked with a devastating guilt about the sudden death of everyone she loved.

But the last third of her future selves felt nothing. Nothing at all. And they felt nothing, because they were all dead.

With her godspell-laced mind working so hotly in the future, Leandra deduced the implications of these emotions into her own, personal prophecy: In one day's time, she had to choose between dying or murdering someone she loved. If she tried to run or avoid the prophecy, everyone she loved would perish.

Leandra misspelled her godspell again so that she could feel only an hour forward. The prism of herselves collapsed enough so that it no longer drove her toward insanity. Her breathing slowed. Her heart calmed. But now she needed to hurry back to Chandralu and solve the mystery of her future murder.

She shuddered as she remembered the emotions of the women she would become. She could not run or everyone she knew would suffer. No way around it. In one day's time, she would have to murder someone she loved or die.

She looked up at Dhrun. He looked back at her with curious, beautifully dark eyes.

Leandra was left with one question.

Who?

 

CHAPTER TWO

Waking from a nightmare, Nicodemus blinked in confusion at himself. Or more accurately, at a copy of himself.

The copy, equally blurry-eyed, blinked back.

They were lying in a dark tent. Humid night. Outside, jungle insects whirred and a river lapped.

Nicodemus could not understand where he was or what he was seeing. The man before him was himself: long raven hair streaked with silver, dark olive skin, chest and arms illuminated with indigo tattoos, wearing a white lungi. But unlike Nicodemus, this man was limned by a wan silvery aura.

If an Ixonian deity chose to ignite their aura, it could not be manipulated or extinguished; a godspell prevented this. Not all deities chose to ignite their auras. But for those who did, an aura authenticated a claim of divinity—useful in an archipelago of gods and imposters. Because an aura shone in proportion to its divinity's strength, the sputtering light around Nicodemus's copy indicated that he was a god near deconstruction.

Nicodemus wondered if he was dreaming still. He remembered a nightmare of … what? A claustrophobic prison, blinding light. There had been a baby with a woman's face, chains, water around his legs. One of his teeth had fallen out. And … and … something more to the nightmare, something of fear and sweetness, an intimation of implacability. Nicodemus tried to remember …

“You won't,” said a low voice, Nicodemus's own voice. “It was a dream of death. That's as far as you will get.”

“What?” Nicodemus croaked.

“You can't recall the dream,” the copy said. Outside, the whirring jungle insects grew louder, softer. A frog made its creaking song.

The copy spoke again, now in a distracted, singsong whisper. “Dreams fill us with a sleeping amnesia that makes us forget ourselves and our world. It unmoors us so that we can float away to all points fantastic, all points horrific. When we wake, the amnesia flows away, taking with it the dream. Before we forgot ourselves; now we forget the dream. We might run after it, try to cup it in our hands. But though a dream is vast, it is fluid. It leaves only fragmented memory, like the tide leaves shells and spiny sea creatures. Impossibly the dream escapes us. Impossibly the ocean drains into the seabed. We are left awake, drydocked as ourselves in this finite world.”

Nicodemus sat up, felt as if he were drunk.

“This has happened before,” the copy said. “When we split while asleep, you forget.”

Nicodemus could only blink.

“Here,” his copy said and laid a hand on Nicodemus's shoulder. His touch, insubstantial as ash, ignited a flare of memories. Nicodemus tried to understand himself.

Perhaps … he was the bastard infant of a minor Spirish noble. His ability to spell was being stolen by the demon Typhon into the Emerald of Arahest … No, no …

Perhaps he was a young wizardly apprentice in Starhaven with a disability called cacography that made every spell he touched misspell. An inhuman creature was loose in the academy, murdering his peers with misspells. Perhaps he was the Halcyon, prophesied to repel the Disjunction. And … No … that had passed.

Perhaps he was a renegade spellwright hiding in Avel, using tattooed skinspells to wage a clandestine war against the demon Typhon. And maybe he wasn't the Halcyon; maybe that was his half-sister, Vivian. Perhaps he was the Storm Petrel, the demonic champion. But … now he was older. Now no one knew who was the Halcyon, Nicodemus or the Vivian. Certainly …

And then Nicodemus knew that he was now past sixty, middle-aged for a spellwright. His wife was named Francesca, his daughter Leandra.

Three decades ago, Francesca and he had defeated Typhon but a dragon known as the Savanna Walker had crossed the ocean. That should have started the Disjunction, but now thirty years later, the demons had still not come. Why?

Vivian had united Trillinon, Verdant, and Spires into the Second Neosolar Empire. There she used the Emerald of Arahest to cast metaspells that made magical language more consistent and logical. As a result, the empire's spellwrights were growing stronger, their deities weaker. An era of invention and industry had increased the empire's power with frightening speed. But Vivian's metaspells also inhibited misspelling in Language Prime, decreasing the diversity of animals and plants, making them more liable to crop failure.

Dral, Lorn, and Ixos had formed the League of Starfall with Nicodemus as their champion, their Halcyon. While Nicodemus's cacography prevented him from writing many spells, it improved his ability to write and cast his unique metaspells, which were, in a way, metamisspells—they caused magical language to become more random, more creatively chaotic, more intuitive. This strengthened the league's deities and allowed them to proliferate. The increased divine strength had, so far, allowed the league to match the empire's power. But an increase in deities meant an increase in neodemons, and so Nicodemus's family had become the league's wardens who hunted, converted, or deconstructed neodemons.

Nicodemus's head began to ache as he tried to make sense of his present situation. “I think,” he said, “I arrived in Chandralu twenty days ago. That's when I cast my metaspell?”

His copy nodded.

“Since then, I've led a party up the Matrunda River, hunting one of the neodemons that has eluded Leandra?”

Another nod. “You're after a neodemon called the River Thief. Hence all … this.” He gestured to the tent.

Nicodemus began to understand. Wherever he cast his metaspell, new deities were incarnated in response to prayers. “So after I cast my metaspell, some of the Ixonians began to illegally pray to me?”

“Hence, me,” the copy said while looking at his hands. “Enough Ixonians prayed to you that I was incarnated with the requisites of assisting your safety and success. In the thoughts of the prayerful, you were the model of incarnation so—”

Nicodemus finished the thought for him. “So because of my disability, you are a god of cacography? One of your requisites is to increase misspelling?”

The copy laid a hand on Nicodemus's shoulder. “See through my eyes.” The god removed a sheet from his legs. A dull crimson light, as from dying coals, filled the tent. Where the copy's feet should have been writhed two masses of red language. The diseased sentences coiled and folded, raising angry blisters in the god's skin. The deconstructing language was working its way up his legs. “I am a text of cacography. I am the incarnation of my own deconstruction.”

In the past thirty years, Nicodemus's life—and those of his wife and daughter—had often depended upon the ability to quickly understand new deities, what models they were incarnated upon, and what requisites they were created to satisfy. Nicodemus had become a scholar of divine taxonomy. That is how he recognized his copy as one of the rarer types of deity, one of the least important, one of the saddest. It gave Nicodemus a hollow feeling.

“How long do you have left?”

The dying god looked away.

“Could we save you by fusing you into a divinity complex? Perhaps with a deity of healing?”

The dying god shook his head. “Our requisites would be too much opposed; the conflict would destroy our incarnation.”

“When was your last incarnation?”

“A year and a half ago, in Highland, right after you and Francesca brought down that lycanthrope neodemon. You'll recall more clearly after my deconstruction.” He smiled sadly. “It was … memorable.”

Nicodemus touched his own hip and he did remember, vaguely. “Right now I can't remember which was worse, the wolf god's claws when I tricked it into attacking me, or the tongue lashing Fran gave me afterward.”

“The tongue lashing. It's not even close. I heard half of her tirade and wondered if you might cry. I don't know how you bear your existence.”

Nicodemus sniffed. “And here I thought that between us, you had ended up on the pitiable side of things.”

“I might be a dying god doomed to cyclical reincarnation and agonizing death, but I could never withstand the torments of your natural condition.”

“You mean the human awareness of mortality?”

“I mean marriage.”

Nicodemus snorted and his copy produced a mischievous smile.

“Does laughing at mortals make your fate more bearable?”

“A little,” the copy said, his smile faltering. “Especially when you lot do particularly idiotic things.”

The keloid scar on Nicodemus's back began to itch. He tried to scratch it. The scar had formed when Typhon had used the Emerald of Arahest to steal his ability to spell. Scar and emerald retained the ability to communicate. Because his half-sister now possessed that gem, Nicodemus had tattooed a matrix of spells around the scar to prevent any such communication.

Nicodemus struggled to remember why he had given the Emerald to his sister, but then he thought of his metaspells and the league kingdoms, rich in divinity and culture. If he had held on to the Emerald, its ability to spell with absolute precision would have stifled the error, the creativity that generated his metaspells.

These thoughts led to vivid memories of the last time he had seen his sister in the city of Avel, their cold farewell.

The dying god flinched. Nicodemus turned his attention back to the present as his copy pulled from his mouth a broken molar. The shattered tooth evaporated into sentence fragments.

The god's aura dimmed even further as he said, “I was reincarnated the day after you cast the metaspell. So long as we both inhabited your body, I shared your thoughts. But when you dreamed, I had a few independent ideas. I've come to believe that deities are only the dreams of mortals. In the moment before waking, it's hard to know who is more real, dreamer or dream. But after we wake…” His voice died away as he held up a hand and grimaced as two fingers peeled open into crimson misspells.

“What would mortals be without dreams?”

The dying god nodded. “A fair question. One the empire might soon answer. But no time for politics. I didn't want to split away tonight. I was hoping to live a few more days, but I've discovered two things you must know. The first concerns the neodemon you're hunting, the one they call the River Thief. As we speak, the neodemon's devotees are stealing the cargo from your second boat.”

Nicodemus swore and started toward the tent flap.

“Wait,” the dying god said, his forearms now dissolving. “Because of my requisite to aid you, I have to tell you … something has happened to Leandra.”

Nicodemus's chest tightened. “What?”

“Something altered Leandra. Some contact with divinity … the exact nature I can't tell … But when I try to investigate, I detect only one of her thoughts, a powerful belief.”

“And?”

“You're not going to like it.”

“I already don't like it.”

Slowly the dying god lay on his back. His waist had become a roiling red tumor. “Less than an hour ago, Leandra had the powerful conviction that—” The dying god's face twisted in pain and his wan silvery aura flickered.