Dogfood.

LEAVING THE DRUM Tower proved simple. Shannon’s key disspelled the ward on the door and, of course, there were no guards in the Stone Court.

Nicodemus worried about being stopped in the hallways. But as he hurried through the stronghold, he found it mostly empty. Occasionally he spotted teams of wizards rushing through a hallway as if on an urgent errand. Oddly, they were usually led by librarians.

At the Main Library’s entrance, Nicodemus reached into Shannon’s scroll and pulled out the passwords. Careful not to hold the text too long, he tossed the paragraph to a guardian spell.

The construct snapped it out of the air and glared at Nicodemus. The canine spell would tear his arms off if it discovered a misspelled rune sequence. A long moment passed as it chewed the words. Nicodemus was about to turn and run when the spell stretched into a dog bow.

Filled with dread, Nicodemus stole into the library. Without sunlight streaming through the windows, the place was dark. Rows of tapers produced dim globes of shifting light that stretched up to the ceiling like an ascending column of stars.

Nicodemus found the place unnervingly empty. He had expected at least a dozen wizards to be working by candlelight. But instead he saw only a handful of librarians rushing off to unknown tasks.

Finding the Index’s chamber was easy enough. And the guardian standing watch before the chamber let him pass when he fed her Shannon’s second paragraph.

As he approached the Index, his hands began to shake. Back in his room he had been so sure-use the Index to discover Shannon’s message, then sneak it away to the compluvium where he could use it to research spells that might harm the golem.

But now Nicodemus noticed faint Numinous sentences running through the chamber’s door frame that he hadn’t seen before. They could only be the sentences of an alarm spell. Removing the Index would trip that spell and summon swarms of sentinels.

He could not steal the Index, but he could still discover why Shannon had sent him there.

With nervous steps, he crept into the chamber and stared at the Index’s blank cover. From outside came the grinding vibration of the guardian shifting her Magnus ball. After cradling the book in his arm, Nicodemus undid the clasp.

Magister Smallwood had said that the Index could search the text of any codex within Starhaven’s walls. And Magister Shannon’s personal research journal had three asterisks embossed on its spine and face, thereby making “***” its title.

Nicodemus opened the Index with the intention of discovering what Shannon had written for him in his research journal.

Warmth bloomed across his cheeks as his body synaesthetically reacted to the Index’s magic. He had expected some synaesthesia, but the strength of this reaction was unsettling. Had something gone wrong? He tried to shift his weight.

But he couldn’t. His muscles would not respond. Panic thrilled up his body as he remembered the nightmare of only hours ago. Was he still dreaming?

The synaesthetic heat in his cheeks burned scalding hot even as a more disturbing warmth flushed across his stomach and groin. He knew that this-his second synaesthetic reaction-indicated the presence of a dangerously powerful foreign spell. His fear became panic.

Without warning, violet ribbons of light erupted from the Index and wriggled into his hands. A surge of nausea turned his stomach and he convulsed in a dry heave.

The Index blazed brighter, and Nicodemus could only watch, paralyzed as an incandescent cylinder emerged from the page. His legs buckled and he fell to his knees. The spell lunged into his throat.

The room blurred and a strange roaring sound throbbed in his ears. Blood flowed down his nose and filled his mouth. Involuntarily, he turned and vomited.

Without his willing them to, Nicodemus’s arms placed the Index back on its marble podium.

The instant the book’s spine touched cool stone, its control over him vanished and he collapsed into darkness.

WHEN NICODEMUS OPENED his eyes, a dull pain was striking the opposite ends of his skull the way a clapper rings the inside of a bell. The world was spinning, and the sour taste of vomit curdled in his mouth.

But he felt like laughing.

The bold arches and thick lines of a new alphabet burned before his eyes with a soft and otherworldly beauty. Like Numinous, this powerful violet language affected light and other text.

After wiping his mouth, Nicodemus staggered to his feet and discovered a myriad of purple sentences floating in slow concentric circles around the Index. More astonishing, a miniature river of the text flowed from the book into his chest and then back.

Slowly he realized what this meant: the Index was a tome, a magical artifact capable of teaching its reader a new language. But it had done so in a shocking and mysterious way.

When Nicodemus was sixteen he had used the Numinous and Magnus tomes to learn the wizardly languages. That had been a slow process, involving days of memorizing runes, vocabulary, and grammar. His ability to see the wizardly languages had developed at a tedious pace. It had been anything but exciting or traumatic.

The Index, on the other hand, had quite literally jammed a new language down his throat.

When he wondered how this was possible, the runes emerging from his chest swelled in number and flowed into the Index. In response, the book flipped a few leaves to present a page worked in black ink. Nicodemus stepped closer to read:

From A Treatis on Lost Spells & Langeuges, by Geoffrey Lea The spell of etching is widely regarded as the most mysterious of the lost godspells. Little is known about this ancent text except that it was written by the primortial sun god Sol. Aparently, a diety would use etching to bind a conscious being, not necessarily a human, as an avatar. There is allso mention of the spell’s ability to “impress” a langeuge upon its target through direct mental contact. The Neosolar pantheon regarded etching as tabboo. The great goddess Solmay forbid any diety who pratciced this spell to travel across the ocean to our land. We can only assume that, at the time of the Exodus, the spell of soulsplitting was already available as an alternative method for binding avatars. Because soulsplitting is the only godspell known to requre the consentual participation of its target, many speculate that etching could be cast upon an unwilling subject. However…

Nicodemus’s mouth worked silently. Somehow, he had conducted a search for mundane text without touching the Index. He inspected the page again.

The words implied that the book had used a godspell to teach him this new language. But that was impossible; only a living being could write magic, and only a deity could cast a godspell.

Nicodemus reread the passage to make sure he had not misunderstood. The text was the same, but this time something about the words bothered him. He read again.

There was something strange about the words “ancent,” “langeuge,” and “conscious.” He studied each one, trying to decide what it was that caught his eye.

A horrible idea filled his mind.

“No!” he whispered, a wild fear tearing loose in his gut. “No! I didn’t!” He staggered closer so that there could be no mistake. “Gods of grace, no!”

But there it was.

Los himself could not have inspired a more excruciating fear than that which now possessed him. He knew there should be an “i” somewhere in the word “ancent.” And “langeuge” should end in “-age.” As for “conscious,” only a fool would fail to put a “huss” after the “s”-conshuss. Or maybe it was “cawnshuss,” but definitely not “conscious”-that was absurd.

There was only one explanation: contact with his cacographic mind had filled the Index with misspellings.