Spellbreaker (6 page)

Four days ago the party had embarked from Matrupor, hopeful of being burgled. But last night Nicodemus had fallen asleep with expectations of failure; they were only a day's journey from the Bay of Standing Islands. And yet here he was, swatting mosquitoes and watching one of his barges being looted.

He studied the river currents and the lapping shoreline waves. The water seemed mundane, but on the sandy bank two of his watchmen lay unmoving. No simple achievement considering that both were master spellwrights. Whatever kind of neodemon the River Thief turned out to be, he clearly was what Nicodemus considered a “subtle” deity.

An ominous sign.

Most young neodemons were blunt minded: fire-breathing attacks on the village walls, tidal waves hurled against merchant ships, hypnotic songs inducing love, madness, or—given the similarity of the two states—both. That sort of thing.

A neodemon whose attack hid his nature was either experienced or an incarnation of guile; a dangerous opponent either way. In fact, the short but colorful list of neodemonic characteristics Nicodemus considered more dangerous than “subtlety” included such qualities as “sustained by the prayers of more than fifty thousand,” “an incarnation of lightning or pestilence,” and “is presently eating my still-beating heart.”

Although subtle neodemons made perilous enemies, they could also be made into powerful allies. Nicodemus had to try to convert the River Thief into a god of the league's pantheon.

After a last look at the stolen barge, Nicodemus crawled to the next tent and pulled back its flap. Before he could whisper, the entryway was filled with a brutish face—wiry white hair, bulbous nose, horsey teeth. Magister John of Starhaven, once Nicodemus's childhood companion and now his personal secretary. The big man's small brown eyes mashed shut, opened wide. “Nico, what—”

Nicodemus held up a hand. “Who's in there with you?”

“Just … Rory.”

Rory of Calad was Nicodemus's envoy from the druids of Dral and an excellent choice for an infiltration game; however, on this journey, Rory had made a rival of Sir Claude DeFral, the new envoy from the highsmiths of Lorn. Favoring one man might cause trouble. “Where's Sir Claude?”

John blinked. “Next tent over.”

“Good. Wake Rory up, quietly.”

When John crawled back into the tent, Nicodemus rose just far enough to see the river. Neither the barge nor the strangers had moved. If the River Thief fled, Nicodemus could do little more than rouse his party and pursue. The chances of catching a riparian god on a nocturnal river chase were minuscule. Nicodemus had to hope that after unloading his present prize, the River Thief would loot another barge.

“Nico!” John whispered from his tent. “Nico, I can't wake Rory.”

“Dead?”

“Still breathing; he pulls his hands back when I pinch his nailbeds. But there's something…” John held a hand to his mouth. “There's something funny about how I'm thinking. It's like I'm feverish or … back in Starhaven.”

Nicodemus frowned. “Starhaven?”

“I can't seem to think of … some things.”

“Dammit,” Nicodemus whispered as he realized what the River Thief had done.

When John had been a boy, the demon Typhon had cursed his mind to induce a stereotype of retardation. The demon had then placed John among Starhaven's cacographers to unwittingly spy on Nicodemus. During Nicodemus's initial confrontation with Typhon, John had escaped the curse and regained his natural intellect. However, the struggle had separated John and Nicodemus for a decade.

That John felt as he had in Starhaven suggested he might have a curse locked around his mind. The River Thief might have cast an incapacitating godspell on the whole party. Only he and John would be resistant; Nicodemus because his cacography would misspell the text, John because his childhood spent battling such a spell had given him some inherent immunity. “John, drag Rory to me.”

“Why—”

“Just do it quickly and … well … here, let's free you completely.” Nicodemus peeled a tattooed disspell from his neck. The luminous violet sentences folded into a tight cage.

Nicodemus had learned this violet language from the kobolds of the Pinnacle Mountains. It was one of the few magical languages with a structure logical enough to resist his cacography; however, it was sensitive to sunlight and would deconstruct in anything brighter than two moonlight.

With a wrist flick, Nicodemus cast the disspell against John's forehead. The violet prose sprang around John's head before sinking into his skull. The luminous sentences flickered as they deconstructed the River Thief's spell.

The big man's head bobbed backward. He flinched, grimaced, wrinkled his nose, sneezed. “Flaming hells, Nico, it feels like you just filled your mouth with snow and started licking my brain.”

“What an expressive image you've come up with,” Nicodemus said dryly. John had never lost his puerile fascination with vulgar imagery. As a child, Nicodemus had gotten into many Jejune wordfights with the big man. Now, it was less amusing.

“You could have warned me.” John groaned.

“Somehow the River Thief has obtunded our party and is stealing our cargo. That's why you've agreed to haul, with particular care and haste, Rory out here.”

Nicodemus could not pull the druid from the tent as his touch misspelled the Language Prime texts in almost any living creature, thereby cursing them with mortal cankers. His wife and daughter, being partially textual, were among the few who could survive his touch. This immunity had been a great comfort to him years ago when his family had still been close together, physically and emotionally.

John disappeared into the tent and after some rustling pulled a limp Rory of Calad into the moonlight.

The druid was maybe six feet tall, dressed in white robes, broad shouldered, in possession of long glossy auburn locks. His freckles and slight chubbiness gave him a disarmingly youthful air that belied his fifty years.

Nicodemus cast a disspell onto the druid's head. As the sentences contracted, Rory's eyes fluttered. Then the violet sentences crushed the godspell around his mind. Rory convulsed once, opened his eyes, rolled over, vomited.

Nicodemus grimaced sympathetically. “John, quietly as you can, haul Sir Claude over here. Stay low. Rory, can you hear me?”

The druid spat. “Yes, but it feels as if—”

“As if a block of frozen mucus is fondling your brain?” John asked helpfully.

Rory looked up at John, frowned. “Yes … yes, that's exactly what it feels like.”

Nicodemus rolled his eyes. “Shut it you two. John, fetch Sir Claude and one of his metal books. Rory, hold still.” Nicodemus began to forge a shadowganger spell on his forearm.

The druid pressed a hand to his stomach. “I promise not to move another muscle unless it involves puking myself inside out.”

Nicodemus pulled the shadowganger spell from his arm and cast it on the druid. The violet paragraphs spun around Rory, bending light away from him until he seemed another moonshadow.

John appeared with Sir Claude thrown over his right arm and a massive book pinned to his side by his left. With little ceremony, John let the book drop. It clanged softly on the ground. Then John laid the knight onto his back.

Sir Claude DeFral—highsmith of Lorn, knight of the Order of the Oriflamme, veteran of the Goldensward War, spy, and assassin—was a thin spellwright in his sixties. His skin was dark brown, his head shaved, his goatee silver. Presently his head lolled back and his mouth fell open. The very picture of coma.

Nicodemus cast a disspell onto the highsmith's head. John was muttering something about slime, snow, and brains when Sir Claude calmly opened his eyes and looked with puzzlement at Nicodemus, John, and the human shadow that was Rory. “Let me guess, my lord,” Sir Claude said, “last night we drank too much?”

“Everyone's a joker tonight,” Nicodemus muttered.

Sir Claude propped himself onto his elbows and looked at Rory. “Druid, such a surprise to meet you here. At least I assume it's you; no one else but you would produce quite such a corpulent shadow.”

“Don't you two start,” Nicodemus growled. “Listen, we haven't much time. Somehow the River Thief snuffed our watch. He's taking our boats out on the river to loot them one by one. I still don't know what he is—a water god I'll wager—but for all we know he could be a wind neodemon or a ghost from the Floating Island. Whatever he is, he might flee downriver at any moment. So Rory, Sir Claude, and I are going to play a Wounded Bird infiltration game.”

John frowned. “What about Doria?”

Magistra Doria Kokalas was Nicodemus's envoy from the hydromancers, a senior clerical physician, and the party's only native Ixonian. Therefore she was—Nicodemus realized too late—the only one who could have judged this plan's feasibility. “There's no time to get Magistra.”

“She's not going to like that,” Rory said.

“Nor will she like you two bungling our only chance to take down the River Thief,” Nicodemus replied as he cast a shadowganger spell first on Sir Claude and then on himself. “Here's the game: The three of us stow away on the third boat. Once they take her out and board her, Sir Claude will play the Wounded Bird to get the River Thief's complete attention. I'll hop in the water and play a Papa to the Rescue. The neodemon will either try to kill me outright—if so, Rory, set the boat on them—or more likely the neodemon will spellbind Sir Claude and me and set off downriver. You two give me an hour to proselytize. If the River Thief converts, great. If not, I play spellbreaker while Rory kills everyone and keeps the boat afloat until Doria catches up with us. Understood?”

“How will Doria know to catch up with you?” John asked.

“You're going to tell her,” Nicodemus replied. “As soon as we stow away, disspell the godspell around Doria's mind. Tell her about our infiltration game and that she's to come after us.”

Rory coughed. “She's not going to like that.”

“You already said that,” Nicodemus replied. “Other comments?”

The shadowganger subtext had transformed Sir Claude into a shadow. He picked up the massive book, which John had dropped next to him. This was one of Sir Claude's copies of the Canticle of Iron, a tome of thin metal sheets upon which the Lornish holy texts and many highsmith spells were written.

“My lord,” Sir Claude said as he rose to a crouch, “are you sure you want to place your honored life, not to mention my own humble existence, in the hands of a tulip gardener?” He nodded toward Rory. “I am, of course, deeply impressed by the druidic art of cultivating pansies, but forgive me if I'm just a bit queasy about playing Wounded Bird to a hostile river god, in the middle of said god's river, while hoping a spellwright schooled in the deadly art of pruning will protect me.”

Rory snorted. “Perhaps we should rely on your deadly art of whining, given that you can only regurgitate the same four spells over and over.”

“Oh, you've caught me out, druid,” Sir Claude replied with lazy sarcasm. “I am quaking in my boots. Would you hold my hand to help me feel safe?”

“The two of you will shut, the burning hells, up,” Nicodemus growled. “You will both do as ordered or I will personally deconstruct the excuse for prose you both call original. Am I understood?”

Sir Claude muttered, “Yes, my lord,” and Rory grunted.

“So, yes, Sir Claude, we are going to put our lives in the hands of a gardener because—as I hope you aren't too stupid to appreciate—druids can spellwright in wood and our barges are covered so completely with Rory's subtexts that he alone can keep us safe when there's blood in the water. So, if you want to survive your Wounded Bird act, then you had better make friends with the white robe.”

The knight bowed to Rory. “Sir, my words were spoken both in haste and with little thought for your many and various excellent qualities. I am profoundly apologetic.” His tone was anything but.

The druid started to reply but Nicodemus cut him off, “We're going.” He turned toward the boats.

“But Nico,” John interrupted, “if you're going to play Papa to the Rescue by jumping in the river … what about your first rule of fighting a water god?”

Nicodemus paused. “We don't know for certain that the River Thief is a water god. It's only the most likely possibility.”

“Or for that matter, my lord,” Sir Claude added, “what about your second rule of fighting a water god?”

They had a point. “Well…” Nicodemus said, “the exception proves the rule.”

Sir Claude coughed. “Forgive me, my lord … but … I believe some excellent scholarship has shown that the modern use of that saying is incorrect.”

“What?”

“I think the original sense of ‘prove' could mean either ‘to establish' or ‘to test.' It's something called a contranym: a word that means both one thing and it's oppo—”

“I know what a—” Nicodemus started to snap.

“So if you're going to get in the water while trying to take down a water neodemon,” John added helpfully, “you're going to try to prove your rule is a bad one.”

“Hey, who here is prophetically connected to the inherent ambiguity and error in language?” Nicodemus asked.

“Technically,” John replied, “you.”

“Then, technically, I decide what rules we're try to prove and how. Right?”

No one spoke.

“Good,” he said curtly. “Follow me.” He turned and ran for the third riverboat.

As his bare feet padded along the dirt, Nicodemus struggled against the urge to glance back. He had no doubt that Rory—young and thirsty for glory—would follow, but Sir Claude had joined Nicodemus's party only recently.

However Nicodemus did not look back; doing so would show a concern for insubordination, and the past thirty years had taught him that the best way to prevent insubordination was to pretend it was impossible and then land like a lightning bolt on anyone who acted otherwise.