He had tried to think about his successful first composition lecture but ended up fretting about the sentinels who had been spying on him. Did they still think him capable of murder? The question had made him think about James Berr, the murdering cacographer who had lived so long ago. Did the sentinels think he was a second James Berr?
Then he had thought about what the druid had told him. Her words had awakened a dormant longing in his heart. Could he actually be the Halcyon? After all these years of coming to terms with his disability, could his cacography be removed?
Half of him wanted to lose himself in dreams of what life might be like if the druid were correct. But the other half was wary and more than a little frightened. What if he dared to believe that he was not crippled and then, once again, discovered that it was all a lie? Could he survive a second disappointment?
He felt his belt-purse for the magical artifact Deirdre had given him. A Seed of Finding, she had called it. Even through cloth, the object made his fingers tingle.
The artifact’s power spoke to the druid’s sincerity. However, she was clearly after something more than curing his cacography. The more Nicodemus thought about it, the more he questioned her motives.
“Fiery blood,” he grumbled, flattening another drop of stew with extra force.
Then there was the advice he had given to the smart-mouthed cacographic boy in his class: “Accept your disability and you will be free,” had been the essence of his message. It had seemed true at the time, but here he was, fervently hoping that his own disability could be erased.
Did that make him a hypocrite? He brought the spoon to his lips and tapped its tip against his front teeth. “Yes,” he grunted, “it bloody well does.”
Suddenly Nicodemus wished everything would just go away. If only he could crawl back to his room and spend the rest of the day reading the knightly romance stored under his bed.
Abruptly Devin thumped her lunch bowl down on the table and sat next to him. “Heard the news?” she asked. “That why you look like you’ve seen Erasmus’s ghost?”
Nicodemus dropped his spoon with a wooden clatter. “Dev, thank heaven you’re here! I need to tell…” his voice died as he remembered his promise to Shannon not to trust anyone. “… need to tell you that I taught my first class on spellwriting. It went well. But the news was so shocking that… I don’t know how to feel.”
“None of us does,” she grumbled, sinking a battered wooden spoon into her stew. “Nico, do you think Starhaven takes care of us?”
“Of course. Most likely we’d have magical literacy permanently censored from our minds if we were in Astrophell.”
“But maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Do you think common folk are distressed by a fire in Trillinon? What’s foreign news to a pig farmer?”
“But, Dev, you’d be illiterate.”
She shrugged. “I don’t read anything but janitorial texts. Sometimes I feel like we’re just ants in an anthill, crippled ants at that. And here comes King Ant now.” She nodded at the raised stage on the far side of the hall. Several deans and foreign spellwrights were standing around a long table.
The provost, sitting in a high-backed wooden chair, floated onstage. Even from his present distance, Nicodemus could make out the muris spell billowing under the arch-wizard’s seat. If he had been closer, he would have seen an obscenely old man who had been half folded over by time. He also would have seen the grizzled old raccoon the provost kept as a familiar.
“Behold,” Devin intoned, “Provost Ferran Montserrat: the only independent mind in this stone heap. That man doesn’t answer to anybody but our god and his avatar. The rest of us are bound, antlike, to his will.”
Nicodemus watched the provost float to the table’s head. With surprising dexterity, the ancient arch-wizard landed his chair and picked up a fork. The deans and their guests sat and began eating.
“Everything is so damn complicated,” Nicodemus grumbled before swearing softly, “blood of Los.”
“Piss and blood in a silver bowl!” Devin hissed. “I forgot!”
Nicodemus jumped slightly in his seat. “Forgot what?”
Devin’s pale face flushed red as she visibly struggled to contain a salvo of obscenity. “Two days ago Magistra Highsmith caught me napping on duty. The old hussy of a historian is making me give a short lecture about Los to the rest of the girls on janitorial. It’s her idea of a penance. The old shrew knows cacographers never study theology. I was supposed to look it up but didn’t.”
Nicodemus raised his eyebrows. “When do you lecture?”
“In half an hour,” Devin said with a glare that dared him to chide her. Fortunately, he knew enough to keep his mouth shut. When she spoke again, it was in a calmer voice. “Nico, tell me everything you know about Los.”
“I’m a cacographer too, you know. I never took theology either.”
“But you memorize everything Shannon says and fawn-”
“All right, all right. Back on the ancient continent there was a golden age when the Solar Empire… and that’s not the Neosolar Empire, which formed on this continent. Anyway, the original Solar Empire existed in peace with the gods. But someone committed a grave sin that enabled Los, then a powerful earth god, to become the first demon.”
“But what sin-”
Nicodemus shrugged. “Every religion has a different answer. Probably no one’s right; probably that knowledge was lost when our ancestors crossed the ocean. As wizards we hold to no belief and so are not bound to a religion or kingdom. All you need to know is that Los took a third of the deities to Mount Calax and turned them into demons. He made an army of all the demons and called it the Pandemonium. That’s where the word comes from: Pan, all, demonium, demons. So when we say the class was pandemonium we’re using hyperbole to-”
“Blasted pisser-” Devin cut herself short and calmed down. “Nico, I get it. Could you just give me the history without your linguistic ramblings?”
Nicodemus grumbled about history and linguistic ramblings being the same thing before continuing. “So after Los formed the Pandemonium, there was a war between deities and demons called the Apocalypse. When it became clear the demons would win, the human deities built huge Exodus ships to cross the ocean. Somehow-no one’s sure how-a group of human heroes turned Los into stone. This bought the ships enough time to get out to sea. The demons, being bound to the ancient continent, couldn’t follow. Then a powerful wind called the Maelstrom scattered the Exodus ships. That’s why each of the current landfall kingdoms has people of different shapes and colorings.”
Devin narrowed her eyes. “In ancient kingdoms everyone looked the same?”
“More or less. Certainly someone like me with black hair and olive skin would not have come from the same kingdom as someone with your red hair and freckles.”
“There’s no need to be snotty, Nico. Cacographers aren’t taught this stuff. And I don’t hang on Magister’s every miniature lecture like you do. When wizards gossip, I’ll listen. But I’d rather chew gravel that listen to most of their academic babble.” She sniffed. “Just another reason why it’d be better if I were illiterate.”
“I’m sorry, Dev, I didn’t mean… But don’t be so unhappy. Even if they permanently censored you, it’s not as if you would be free. You’ve told me yourself, magical illiterates are bound to the land or their trade. They have to work in the fields for lords or barons or whatnot.”
She only shrugged and turned back to her stew. “Couldn’t be worse than it is here.”
Nicodemus leaned forward. “Dev, you’d have no spells to wash your face or clean your teeth. No constructs to empty the night pot. And you’d be short-lived.”
Suddenly her brown eyes burned with their characteristic fire. “Well f-” Again she visibly suppressed an obscenity. “I don’t care a fig for that! Not all of us are as strong as you, Nico. I’ll barely see a century. And I’m nearly fifty already. I might not look it, but I am. If I were illiterate, at least I wouldn’t outlive my family.”