Spellbreaker (5 page)

He stared into her eyes a moment longer but turned away. “Hey Peleki, take us in to Keyway Island. I'll meet you there. You got the shark's lei.” He tossed the leimako to the lieutenant, who caught the shark toothed oar and nodded. “Yes, Captain.”

With that, Holokai flashed a smile at Leandra and dove off the center deck and into the dark water without a splash.

As Leandra watched her old friend swim away, she held a hand over her belly. The pain from the flare was getting worse. Sometimes her disease would double her over with pain, puff up her face and joints like rising bread. Then she'd have to take the disgusting stress hormone the hydromancers made with their aqueous runes. That would stop the human aspects of her body from attacking her textual aspects, but the drug's other effects were horrible. She hated her body for its civil wars, her disease.

Leandra wondered again if, in one day's time, she might kill the human half of herself. That might count as murdering someone she loved. Perhaps the textual half of her would live on. That thought withered her smile. She would hate to become like her mother. And, anyway, to kill only the human half of herself wouldn't be possible.

Leandra turned her thoughts to other people she might have to kill. Having sent Holokai to search for those just coming into the city, she should also consider those just now coming into her affection.

“Huh,” Leandra said in surprise as she added another name to the list. “Lieutenant, pass the word for Dhrun.”

Lieutenant Peleki sent the command down the ship. While she waited, Leandra considered the white half-moon and its watery reflection amid the standing islands.

When she was six years old, her father had taken her from Lorn to Ixos for the first time. Their first night in Chandralu, looking up from the Floating City, a young Leandra asked her father why all three moons had followed them across the ocean. He laughed and tried to explain about the moons being so far away that they looked the same from anywhere. She hadn't believed him.

“My lady,” a voice said behind her.

Leandra turned to see that Dhrun had changed her manifestation; the divinity complex was now a tall, fair-skinned, athletic woman. This was the incarnation of a Cloud Culture goddess of victory. She had been known as Nika before fusing with Dhrun, a male Lotus Culture neodemon of wrestling, and his avatar Dhrunarman, the winner of last year's wrestling tournament. The resulting trinity had taken its most powerful incarnation's name even though it rarely manifested that incarnation.

In her Nika manifestation, Dhrun wore the same black lungi and scale armor vest that she had on the beach; however, these vestments now covered shapely hips, two small breasts, and four muscular but distinctly feminine arms. Her eyes were wide, long lashed, very dark.

When composing her divinity complex, Dhrun had chosen not to light an aura around her body to announce her divinity; her four arms achieved the same feat without increasing her visibility during more covert activities.

Presently Dhrun bowed her head and pressed her hand to her heart in the custom of the Cloud Culture. Absently, Leandra realized that Holokai's crew, all of whom were Sea People, would find Dhrun an excellent sailing companion given that she was of all three cultures and could help the ship fulfill the Trinity Mandate, which required all official Ixonian endeavors to involve at least one member of each of the archipelago's three cultures.

“My friend,” Leandra said while pressing her own hand to her heart, “would you step closer?”

Dhrun did so, curiosity plain on her face.

“You have been in my service for a year now?” Leandra asked.

“A little less.”

“And how do you find it?”

“It suits me well.”

“Is there any reason why you would be dissatisfied?”

Dhrun's smile never wavered. “I should like a little more time in the wrestling arena. A goddess does like to be worshiped, after all. And I am second in your esteem after Holokai. I should like to be first; given my requisites, I am a bit competitive.”

“I've already warned you about baiting Holokai.”

Dhrun smiled. “I thought you hated how much your parents pun.”

“Pun?”

“Baiting Holokai, given his … other incarnation. I thought you were punning.”

“Oh Creator, no, not intentionally. I mean that I can't have you and Holokai fighting.”

“Why do you doubt my satisfaction in your service?”

Leandra considered the goddess's face. “You are the only neodemon I've ever known who converted herself.”

Dhrun's smile brightened. “Ah, my conversion. It wasn't easy, you know, breaking into your bedroom chamber like that.”

“If it were easy, I suppose you wouldn't have done it.”

“I wouldn't have,” she agreed before stepping beside Leandra. With her lower arms, Dhrun took Leandra by the elbow and led her to the portside hull, where they could better watch the whitemoon's reflection. Walking made Leandra's knees ache, but now they stood together like two friends. It was a comforting feeling.

Just then Leandra realized that many of her future selves felt almost nothing, or bursts of nonsensical emotion. She tensed, wondering what strange catastrophe would happen in the next hour. Some magical attack? Maybe her disease flare would worsen and expand her perception to a maddening degree? Or maybe … Suddenly she laughed.

“What is it, my lady?” Dhrun asked.

“An hour from now, I will likely be asleep and dreaming. I can feel it. It's a strange sensation.”

The goddess frowned.

Leandra continued in a more serious tone, “We were talking about your conversion, its suspicious nature.”

Dhrun snorted. “You're suspicious only because, when you finally discovered me in your bedroom, you had to admit that I looked better in your blue Lornish dress than you do.”

“It does look better on you,” Leandra grumbled, enjoying the banter. It was nice having another woman to talk to, even if Dhrun wasn't always a woman. “Won't you tell me why you decided to arrange your own conversion? You were a successful neodemon. You could have avoided detection for years.”

Dhrun only smiled. “Didn't we agree that we would never discuss what came before?”

“Your crimes were that great?”

The goddess's smile faltered by a degree. “That would be telling.”

Leandra laughed. “I will give you more time in the wrestling arena if you can answer a rather difficult question.”

“You know I can't resist a challenge.”

“Why would I want to kill you tomorrow morning?”

“Because you realized that the green Spirish dress also looks better on me?”

Leandra smiled but then looked directly into Dhrun's eyes.

“Oh,” the goddess said, “you are serious?”

“I am.”

Farther aft, the lieutenant called for the sails to be brought down and for all sailors to take up positions along the hulls to paddle into Keyway Island.

Dhrun cleared her throat. “You speak like one who has received a prophecy.”

“Through the godspell I bought from the smuggler.”

“I don't mean to doubt you, but is it a … strong prophecy?”

“I inherited my mother's ability to comprehend the possibilities of the future. I do not have her gift for seeing the landscape of time, but I am a good enough judge. I foresaw that I cannot escape the choice between killing someone I love sometime early tomorrow morning or dying myself. Hence, goddess, my challenge to you.”

Dhrun nodded. “Then … I suppose you might dispose of me if my death would advance our cause significantly—say by eviscerating me to make one of those godspells you are buying from the smuggler.”

“Well played,” Leandra said softly. “Here I thought I was interrogating you. You know, for a young divinity, you are impressively shrewd.”

“Oh the boys are young, but Nika—like most everything in the Cloud Culture—has been around forever. I was first incarnated when the Cloud People were still a seafaring tribe on the western Spirish coast. I have some hazy memories of the Spirish tribes destroying our cities and exiling us to the sea. There were decades of wandering before we fought the outer islands away from the Lotus People.”

“Maybe you should stop playing with the boys so much and write some of it down, for posterity.”

“There's no glory in posterity. Victory begets posterity, not the other way around. But to answer your question, my lady, if you were to kill me tomorrow, it would be to deconstruct me and sell some part of my text to that smuggler we just met.”

Leandra met the goddess's eyes. “You know I am dealing with the smuggler to discover how to stop his kind.”

“My lady, I am two thirds a wrestler,” Dhrun said. As she spoke the arm interlaced with Leandra's became thicker, hairier.

When Leandra looked up at Dhrun's face, the divinity had manifested Dhrunarman: dark eyes, strong jaw covered by a scrim of a youthful beard. Dhrun's voice, so suddenly male, was low. “Learning an illegal hold helps one escape it, but it also increases the temptation to use it.”

“Dhru, do you think me that ruthless?”

He looked at her with a young man's face but through the eyes of an ancient soul. “Most divinity complexes I've encountered are a fixed mixture of the beings that fused to create them. There are very few who, like me, can shift within the bounds of our incarnations. Would you agree?”

Leandra said that she would.

“When you can change so fast—from male to female, from young to old—you can see how fast everyone else changes but doesn't realize it simply because the color of their hair or skin or what's between their legs is constant. It seems to me that every soul—human or divine—is far more flexible than it ever supposes.”

Leandra paused to think about this and looked aft. She was supposed to be watching for whatever Holokai might have seen flying between the Standing Islands. Seeing nothing but moonlit limestone, she turned back to divinity complex.

“So, you think that under the right circumstances—perhaps if deconstructing you would benefit our cause—I could become that ruthless?”

Dhrun took both of her shoulders in his upper hands and looked into her eyes. “I know what our cause means to you. I know how much you have suffered.” He paused. “And, given how much I believe in our cause, part of me hopes that, if it would mean victory, you would be that cold and calculating. So if I may, I'll turn the question around: Do you think you could be that ruthless?”

Leandra made her expression as blank as her heart felt.

Slowly, he nodded. “I thought so.”

 

CHAPTER FOUR

There was only one problem with Nicodemus's metaspell: Wherever he cast it, prayers were answered.

Literally.

In league kingdoms, five thousand or so humans praying about a specific need incarnated a deity dedicated to that need's resolution. The goals that helped answer those prayers became a deity's “requisites.” Satisfying such requisites caused prayerful text to be cast from ark stones to deities, bestowing power and pleasure.

As a result, Nicodemus's metaspells created disciplined armies led by war goddesses, artisans trained by sly deities of skill, crops protected by jovial—if not always sober—harvest gods, and so on. The “divine mob” or “god mob,” as they were called when tongues were in cheeks, had made the league as powerful as the empire. The problem was that some human prayers, and therefore some gods of the mob, were malignant. The problem was the proliferation of neodemons.

And it was one hell of a problem.

Neodemons were far weaker than the true demons of the Ancient Continent, but they could nonetheless manifest all the malicious potentials of the human heart. And thirty years of hunting neodemons had lead Nicodemus to believe that such potentials were nearly infinite in variety and ingenuity.

*   *   *

Nicodemus opened the doorflap and stood amid a dark camp—round tents, a cooking fire gone to ash and embers. On three sides, nightblack jungle climbed up to starry groves of sky. Just beyond the camp, a sandy riverbank formed a cove where five river barges had been moored. A gap stood between the first and the third boat like a missing tooth.

Roughly sixty yards out on the mile-wide river floated the stolen barge. Three stranger vessels—a riverboat and two canoes—were lashed to the barge. Several figures moved between them: humans, or at least humanoids, probably piratical devotees of the River Thief.

Nicodemus groaned. After arriving in Chandralu twenty days ago, he had learned that Leandra had failed for a year to dispatch two neodemons—one a monkey goddess of brigands, attacking caravans south and east of the city; the other, a water god known as the River Thief, was stealing cargo from the Matrunda River merchants between Chandralu and the ancient Lotus capital of Matrupor.

None of the merchants had realized they were the River Thief's victims until they docked in Chandralu and discovered their merchandise had been replaced with river stones. The merchants had tried setting guards, changing routes, employing mercenary divinities, but nothing deterred the River Thief. More disconcerting, Leandra had twice led investigations to Matrupor without uncovering a clue as to how the pirate god achieved such spectacular larceny.

Hearing this, Nicodemus had suspected one of Leandra's officers was corrupt and informing the River Thief. So Nicodemus had told both Leandra and the Sacred Regent of Ixos he would hunt the monkey neodemon when, in fact, he had secretly led several barges filled with Lornish steel up river to Matrupor, hoping that the River Thief would mistake him for a merchant and strike.

But the journey had been uneventful. Under the guidance of Magistra Doria Kokalas, his envoy from the hydromancers, Nicodemus had sold his cargo in the ancient Lotus capital for a modest profit and filled his barges with rice, silk, jade. Wondering if the black market would attract the River Thief's attention, Nicodemus had hidden contraband opium in each of his barges.