Authors: Blake Charlton
Spellbound (22 page)
Cyrus was moving his arms and something splashed out of his hands.
“Cyrus!” She called. “Don'tâ”
But it was too late. His hands moved and a small train of sparks jumped forth. They hit the wall below him and a long tongue of flame blossomed. The fire spread four or five feet down the wall and filled the ruined temple with light.
“Damnation,” Francesca muttered. Somehow, Cyrus had gotten a hold of oil and flint.
“Fran?” Cyrus called.
Where light shone on Francesca, the spells restraining her seemed to dissolve. She groaned as the censoring text that had been locked around her mind vanished.
“Nicodemus, wait!” she called. “Don't do anything stupid.” She looked around, searching for the rogue wizard. But the firelight illuminated only fallen beams, ash, and loose stones. Behind the piles of rubble stretched dancing black shadows.
Cyrus leaped down through the hole in the dome. A small cloth canopy bulged above him, casting air downward and slowing his descent.
Francesca struggled free of her spellbindings as Cyrus landed and ran to her. The burning oil on the far wall began to gutter. Still, she could make out Cyrus's face. His veil was up, his brown eyes wide. “You disspelled the sentence around my heart?” He took her hand.
“Damn it, I'm sorry I didn't tell you, but that's not what we should worry about just now. I was speaking to Nicodemus and heâ”
“If Nicodemus wants to talk,” Cyrus interrupted, “he can do so when we're not censored and spellbound.” He pulled her toward a hole in the temple walls. The flames he had lit were dying, and the shadows they cast danced longer and longer from the rubble.
“Cyrus, you don't understâ” Her words became a scream.
Cyrus had stepped on a shadow. Instantly the darkness welled up and grew muscular arms that wrapped around Cyrus's head and chest. As quickly as they had appeared, the arms yanked Cyrus down and back into the shadow, where they both vanished.
Francesca screamed again and jumped away from the lengthening shadow. But the flames were fading. Shadows grew behind her. She turned around, but everywhere was darkness. She was breathing so fast her hands tingled. “Nicodemus! There's no need for this!”
The flames began to fail. “Nicodemus!” she cried, writing Numinous flamefly paragraphs. As soon as she finished a spell, she cast it above her. The tiny text fluttered up, coiling around on itself so fast that it incandesced.
But no sooner had the paragraph started to shine than something blasted it into golden runes. She cast another flamefly into the air, and it was broken into fragments. Nicodemus or his students were disspelling her incandescent texts as fast as she could write them.
“Nicodemus, we can talk!”
No response. The dying flames guttered and then went out. She screamed as darkness enveloped her.
At first Cyrus struggled against the spellbindings, but he was blind, deaf, and censored. He tried to call out but his mouth was held shut.
He stopped fighting. Anger boiled through him. How could he have been so stupid? He had pitted a flask of lamp oil against blue-skinned monsters and foreign magic. But he had had to try. He couldn't have abandoned Francesca or charged blindly into the dark.
Suddenly he could hear again, and the bonds around his legs vanished. Rough hands grabbed his still-spellbound arms.
His vision returned, and something forced him to look up. It took him a moment to realize that he was seeing patches of late twilight sky through the ruined temple dome. A dark square moved through the sky, momentarily blacking out evening's first few stars. It was a lofting kite, he realized, flying low over the temple.
“You fight kobolds like an amateur,” a manâno doubt Nicodemus Wealâsaid in the dark. “And you charge into a skinwriter stronghold with only a splash of fire and the spells in your robes. That tells me that you are either ignorant to our struggle against Typhon or simply ignorant. You have maybe five sentences to convince me the former is true. Otherwise, we'll open your throat and leave your body for the other demon worshipers to find.”
The textual gag around Cyrus's mouth vanished. A second dark lofting kite was now circling above the temple. “I'm the new air warden of Avel,” he said as calmly as he could, “arrived only fourteen nights ago. Until today, I've never heard of a demon in Avel or tension between Cala and Celeste. Deirdre said the demon brought me in as a screen.”
“I am not terribly convinced. Two more sentences.”
“But what else can Iâ” Cyrus fell silent as something sharp pressed the side of his neck.
“One more sentence.”
“The demon brought me here to hide the brewing rebellion,” Cyrus said quickly. “If there are demon-worshiping hierophants, they've been hidden from me. If they find me now, I'm as good as dead. I'm not your enemy; I'll swear on the Creator's name.”
From above, he could hear the whoosh of low-flying kites.
Nicodemus grunted. “Pilot, you are either in earnest or a fine liar.”
The restraints around Cyrus's head and neck relaxed so that he could look around. Two figures made of darkness stood beside him. One had the proportions of a tall, lean man. The other was shorter, with shoulders too broad to be human.
“Those pilots up there,” the figure that seemed to be Nicodemus said, “did you bring them?”
Cyrus shook his head. “I saw a kite flying above the night market when I bought the lamp oil. I thought it had strayed from patrolling the walls.”
Nicodemus grunted. “More like Deirdre set pilots to looking for you two in case you dug us out of hiding. They must have seen you fly from the night market. Very well, pilot: if you want to stay alive, do not endanger me or the kobolds. Understand?”
“Where's Francesca?”
“Here,” she answered hoarsely from somewhere beside him. He looked over but saw only shadow. “Subtextualized, like you.” Cyrus looked down and saw that he seemed to be made out of tangible darkness. Whatever prose this man wrote, it could distort light as well as any wizardly spell.
A new dark figure moved toward them over the rubble. Nicodemus went to it. There followed a brief conversation in what he supposed was the kobolds' language.
“They're already here,” Nicodemus whispered as the shorter figure moved away. “Magister, go with Vein. Francesca and Cyrus, stay with the kobold next to you. We're casting doppelgängers out the back and dashing out the front.”
A kobold behind Cyrus seemed to object.
“No,” Nicodemus said forcefully. “No, Vein, I told you. Dross already told you thatâ” He switched into the kobold language. Then everyone started to move.
Cyrus's spellbindings, save those holding his hands together, dissolved. A figure grabbed his robes and pulled him along. It was all he could do to keep from tripping over the stones and beams littering the ground. They passed into a hallway that was in worse condition. Straining to see, Cyrus could make out two other dark figures walking beside them. Francesca and her kobold captor, he supposed.
At the hallway's end, he saw a courtyard filled with uneven stones and a cracked fountain. The ground was covered by rain puddles reflecting the starry sky. The creature that had been pulling Cyrus crouched in a corner and so disappeared into its shadow. Cyrus did likewise.
He waited, listening to his breath. Though he wore thick hierophantic robes, they were devoid of text. It left him feeling naked.
Nicodemus must have cast some censoring text about him. Not that it would have mattered. Each of his breaths would produce only a few sentences. It would be a day before his cloth had accrued enough text to form a passable defensive spell, a week or more before he could form a jumpchute.
And perhaps it was good that he was censored. Textually invested robes would shed a blue glow that hostile hierophants might see.
Suddenly Cyrus remembered the lofting kite that had flown over the ruined temple's dome. It had appeared as a rectangle of cloth that was ⦠dark ⦠not aglow with spells.
The hierophantic language could not bend light and so could not render anything invisible; however, its subtextualized spells became invisible to other hierophants. During the Civil War, pilots had learned to make their rigs less visible by subtextualizing their canopies and robes. Having served aboard a warship, Cyrus had practiced creating and gleaning hierophantic subtexts.
So he gritted his teeth and thought about how a wing commander might try to hide his pilots. What diction would he use? What prose style?
They blazed before him. Five of them, all perched like hawks on the courtyard's ruined walls and minarets. He sucked in his breath.
A kobold whispered, “Qui ⦠et”
“You can understand me?” Cyrus whispered.
“Yes ⦠shut it.”
“Listen, there are five hierophants out in the courtyard.”
The shadow before him became a blue-black face framed by blond hair. The kobold held up a hand and Cyrus saw that it possessed three retractable claws between each of its humanoid fingers. “Fi-ive?” he asked holding out all his digits.
When Cyrus nodded, the kobold spoke. “Fol-low,” the humanoid enunciated before he began creeping back into the temple. Hands still bound, Cyrus hurried after and was relieved to see two other dark figures following.
After climbing over several rafters, they came to a narrow hole in the wall. The ground before it had been cleared of debris. Cyrus supposed Nicodemus's party had prepared this place as a possible exit.
“Look,” the kobold grunted and pushed Cyrus toward the hole. Slowly Cyrus stuck his head into a narrow alleyway that ran between the temple and another ruined stone building. The muddy ground had been churned up into irregular mounds. He thought he could see claw marks in the footprints.
He looked up and wasn't surprised to see the pale blue glow of a single
hierophant crouched atop the temple wall directly above him. After pulling his head back inside, Cyrus found several more dark figures whispering to each other.
hierophant crouched atop the temple wall directly above him. After pulling his head back inside, Cyrus found several more dark figures whispering to each other.
“There's only one pilot,” he reported. “But he's perched just above this exit. Probably he's holding his canopy. Soon as he sees something come out, he'll cast it down, either crushing us flat or cutting us into pieces, depending on how he's edited the cloth.”
Nicodemus answered. “There's just one above the alley?”
“Just one, but he's well hidden and subtextualized. If I were commanding this strike, I'd put only one pilot there. It's narrow and long enough that we'll have to run for a while to get free. He can raise the alarm.”
“Step back, Cyrus,” Nicodemus said before uttering several guttural kobold words. “Dross is going to hold onto you while I step out there and deal with your one hierophant. If it turns out to be otherwise, Dross will make sure you die before I do. Do you want to change your story now?”
“I'm not lying,” Cyrus whispered as two rough hands pulled him further into the dark and then rested what felt to be five rough fingers and three sharp claws on his throat.
The tall figure moved into the exit and crouched. They seemed to be waiting for something. An old man spoke. “Nico, are you sure the doppelgänger spells wereâ”
Cries sounded from the other side of the temple and were followed by several muffled booms that could only be hierophantic canopies deliberately cast against the ground to crush.
Nicodemus jumped out into the alleyway, turned, and threw something upward. Cyrus cringed, expecting sailcloth to slam down and claws to dig into his own windpipe. But then Nicodemus jerked one arm downward. Something heavy hit the ground with a splash and thud.
Then the kobolds were pushing forward. Cyrus hurried into the alleyway and saw a bodylike mass of darkness sprawled in the mud. He flinched as he realized that Nicodemus had cast up a text that had disspelled the hierophant's cloth, subtextualized the pilot, and then soundlessly yanked him down. It was a frightening demonstration of a deadly prose style and a ruthless author.
A shadowy figure went to the downed pilot. “It's no use, Francesca,” Nicodemus said. “He's dead.”
Suddenly the body began to glow faintly blue. At first, Cyrus thought it was a hierophantic spell. But the light was too weak and spread out in trickles as if it were leaking ink. “Lucerin,” Francesca whispered.
“Typhon's got his pilots carrying the stuff in lantern vials so they can disspell our texts with its light,” Nicodemus grumbled. “Now come on.”
The party began running down the alley.
“What is lucerin?” Cyrus asked as he fell in behind the figure he judged to be Francesca.
“A compound hydromancers make by combining their texts with certain solvents. I don't understand it, but when you mix lucerin with something like an acid, it produces that blue light. Clerics use it to provide light when it's dark and they need to open a body but can't write a light-generating spell. It's precious stuff. The amount that man was holding would fetch several gold sovereigns at market.”
One of the kobolds hissed for them to be silent.
They ran along the alley and then into the wasteland of burnt-down houses. Stray cats scattered before them. The remaining chimneys stood like a forest of dead trees.
Cyrus looked back at the ruined temple. He could see five kites now aloft. Blue lucerin light shone from one side of the temple. The pilots must have been fooled into attacking Nicodemus's doppelgänger spells. If that was the case, then they certainly were no longer fooled. The kites were beginning to fly in widening circles, searching the rubble.
Cyrus looked ahead to a row of houses twenty yards away. He felt exposed out among the charred timbers and chimneys. He longed for a lofting kite, or at least textually saturated robes. He was about to turn and look for Francesca when a yellow light flashed ahead of them.
“Wait!” he whispered and stopped. “There's something up there.”
A rough kobold hand dragged him forward. “Wait!” he said louder. “I saw someâ”
The rest of his words were drowned out by two piercing notes blasted out of a horn. The party halted. The notes were familiar to Cyrus; they were used by the city watch as a signal, but for what he couldn't remember.
“What was that?” Francesca asked. No one answered. Now Cyrus could see flashes of yellow and red light among the houses. Torchlight.
Then he saw them.
Ahead, emerging from around the houses, was a long line of torchcarrying men. To both right and left, the line stretched away as far as Cyrus could see. The torch flames illuminated not only green and white cloaks but also glinting steel points of spears and crossbows.
The two-note horn blast came again. This time, Cyrus recognized the signal. Intruders had breached the city's defenses. The horn blast was a command for the watchmen to line up from one end of the district to the other and sweep through North Gate until the intruder was found.
A district-wide lycanthrope hunt had begun.
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