CHAPTER Twenty-four

Strangely, Nicodemus knew he was dreaming.

Around him seethed a tunnel of gray and black language-an endless, meaningless mash of written words. He was traveling down it. Magister Shannon’s voice sounded above him: “I don’t understand. Turtles?”

Then his own voice: “Look, that hexagonal pattern…”-the words became faint-“… of a turtle shell.”

The voices died and in their place sounded a long series of rhythmic, echoing clacks.

And then Nicodemus stood in the cavern of his previous nightmare-low ceiling, gray floors, a black stone table. The body lying upon it was again covered in white. Again a teardrop emerald lay in its gloved hands.

But new to the cavern was a standing stone, as tall as a man and as broad as a horse. It stood behind the black table. Three undulating lines flowed from the stone’s top down to its base.

White, vinelike stalks erupted from the ground and swayed to an unfelt breeze. The stalks sprouted pale ivy leaves and began to intertwine. Within moments, a knee-high snarl of albino ivy covered the floor.

“I was the demon’s slave,” a low voice rumbled. It came from everywhere. “I cut him in the river.” The voice grew louder. “I cut him in the river!”

Nicodemus tried to run, but the pale ivy entangled his legs. He tried to scream, but his throat produced only a long painful hiss. He reached down to pull at the weeds but froze when he saw his hands covered by the hexagonal plates of a turtle’s shell.

Suddenly he could not move so much as his eyelid. From toe to top hair he was encased in thick black shell.

“I CUT HIM IN THE RIVER!”

A blinding red light enveloped Nicodemus. Agony lanced through his every fiber as his shell shattered.

Looking up, he saw the emerald produce a sphere of light-wispy and sallow at the edges, but blazing green at its core.

The small emerald’s radiance grew until it burned the cavern and everything in it into airy nothingness.

Above stretched a pale-blue sky, below, lush savanna grass. Ancient oak trees dotted a hillside that overlooked the wide, green water of a reservoir. Nicodemus recognized the place as a springtime Spirish meadow near his father’s stronghold.

In the meadow’s center, a tattered blanket provided seating for a young boy and a woman. She was a rare beauty: pale skin with a light spray of freckles, bright hazel eyes set above a snub nose, thin lips, a delicate chin.

But her most stunning feature was the long bronze hair cascading down her back in slow curls that glinted gold in the sunlight.

A book, a knightly romance, sat in the woman’s lap. Her lips moved as she read from it but the dream provided no sound.

The boy had long black hair and a dark olive complexion. He was perhaps eight years old and gazed at the woman with fierce green eyes. This was as much a memory as it was a dream.

The woman’s name was April, the boy’s Nicodemus.

This was a vision of long ago when Lord Severn-Nicodemus’s father-had seen fit to educate his bastard. The lord had brought April into his household ostensibly to educate his son, but most everyone knew the lord visited her chamber at night.

April had been a kind teacher but not a determined one. After Nicodemus’s first dozen futile reading lessons, she began reading her favorite books aloud to him. Being Lornish, April had been enamored of knightly romances. And after the first tale of maidens and monsters, so was the young Nicodemus.

The dream became fluid. The vision of April and his young self began to flicker. Now Nicodemus’s image was ten years old. There were flashes of Nicodemus reading alone, but more often he was with April, begging her for something.

Memory provided the details the dream left out. In what was perhaps the only shrewd act of her life, April had noticed Nicodemus’s interest in knightly romance and began reading to him less and less. When possible, she stopped at a tale’s most exciting point, claiming she was too tired to continue.

The young Nicodemus yearned to learn what happened next in each story, but his progress was slow. At times he confused his frustration regarding the text with his frustration regarding his governess’s body.

Noticing his improvement, April ceased reading to him entirely but supplied more books. Now the dream showed only images of Nicodemus reading alone.

The dream world shifted. Gone were the meadow and sunshine. Nicodemus now watched his ten-year-old self lying abed in his small Severn Hold chamber. He was reading a book titled Sword of Flame.

The bedside candles danced as several nights flickered by-this was the time when, in three agonizing months, Nicodemus had taught himself to read so that he might find out if Aelfgar, a noble paladin, could mend Cailus, his broken sword, with the Fire Stones of Ta’nak, and then wield it to free the beautiful Shahara from Zade, an evil cleric who commanded the snakelike Zadsernak.

Although the youthful Nicodemus had had trouble remembering the many silly invented names, he was delighted with the story’s inevitable course and eager to read the next twenty-seven books in the series, though he doubted that they were all as good.

Time flickered again. Now Nicodemus saw the warm night on which he had finished Sword of Flame. His young self laid the book down on his chest and fell asleep to the sound of spring rain and the cries of a full robin’s nest outside his window.

“No,” the adult Nicodemus moaned. On this night, in a dream about April, he would be born to magic. The resulting magical effulgence would set the entire western wing of Severn Hold on fire, killing a horse and maiming two stable boys.

“Wake!” Nicodemus shouted. “Wake up!” But his boyish self slept on. He tried to move but found his adult legs paralyzed. The window above young Nicodemus creaked open.

A thick arm of ghostly white ivy vines grew with jerky, nightmare speed onto the window frame and surrounded the bed. The adult Nicodemus yelled again, trying to wake himself.

The nightmare ivy hadn’t been there when he had been a boy. But now its pale tentacles leaped onto the bed and within moments blanketed the dreaming child with ashen leaves. The world exploded with light. Everywhere flames roared. A horse screamed its death as the rafters came crashing down around Nicodemus. The stone walls tottered and then fell with a deep, grinding growl.

Suddenly nothing hung above Nicodemus but a too-low nightmare sky of seething gray text. Next to him stood April, untouched by flames. “Run, Nicodemus!” she cried. “He has your shadow!” Darkness radiated from her, blotting out the nightmare sky.

“There is no safe place!” Her hair became trains of stars and spread across the growing night sky.

“The white beast will find you unless you fly from Starhaven! Fly with anything you have!”

Her body faded into nothing and her face became the glowing face of the white moon.

“Fly and don’t look back!”

There was a deafening crash and then… blackness.

“Never look back!”

AMADI WAS SITTING in the hallway, using two Magnus clauses to pick splinters from her forearm, when Kale found her.

“Magistra! What happened?”

She flinched as a clause drew out a half inch of bloody wood. “Bookworms infested both sides of a bridge. We were containing the first blast when the second went off in my ear. The deputy provost was right: these worms have an uncanny intelligence. Every time it seems we’ve deconstructed the last one, another violent deconstruction pulls us back into a fray.”

She looked up at her secretary. He had several scrolls tucked under one arm and a thick codex under the other. Behind him stood the two sentinels who had been guarding Shannon’s quarters.

“And what in the burning hells took you so long?” she asked. “The Drum Tower guards were here an hour ago.”