She dried her eyes. “Nicodemus, don’t oppose her will. My desires are not my own. She’ll control me again. She’ll make me overpower you and drag you to her ark.”
Nicodemus let go of the woman’s hand. “Don’t threaten me, Deirdre. I am no wizard, but I am a spellwright.”
She retook his hand. “Nicodemus, you might cut me to pieces with your words, but Boann-”
“Let go of me.” He tried to pry off her fingers.
Her other hand clamped around his tattooed wrist. “Don’t do this; you will lose.”
Nicodemus extemporized a common language constricting spell along his tongue and spat the sentences around her elbows.
Surprised, Deirdre weakened her grip just enough for Nicodemus to slip his right hand free. He threw his arm back and wrote along it a short Magnus club. The text most likely was misspelled and would break after a single stroke, but he could deliver at least one blow.
Meanwhile, Deirdre heaved with her great strength and snapped the sentences wrapped around her elbow.
“Deirdre, stop, I’ve a spell in my-” He fell silent.
She now held the greatsword in her right hand. They locked eyes.
“Please,” she whispered, her eyes full of fear, “I cannot yield.”
“Then you will have to-” He stopped as a wall of faint golden light washed through the cellar. He jumped.
“What is it?”
A second wall of light flew through the cellar. Nicodemus dropped his Magnus club and caught one of the tiny Numinous words that made up the strange light.
Realization came with a surge of excitement. “It’s a broadly cast spell!” He began to translate the golden text. “It’s like a magical beacon.”
Deirdre lowered the greatsword. “But who would send a beacon to us?”
Nicodemus struggled to his feet. “We have to go. Let go of me.” When she did, he ran to pick up the Index.
“What happened?”
He grabbed her forearm as if to pull her along. “I’ll explain as we go. Now hurry!”
As they ran up the stairs, Nicodemus looked down at the translated word that glowed faintly gold on his palm. It read “nsohnannanhosn.”
DEIRDRE FROWNED. AGAIN Shannon doubled over and vomited nothing. Again Nicodemus went to his side and held the old man’s dreadlocks back from his face. The Index lay beside them. Azure, perched on a nearby rock pile, bobbed her head nervously.
Deirdre was sitting with Simple John in front of their campfire. Around them stretched the nighttime Chthonic ruins. The horse that Shannon had been riding was grazing somewhere out in the dark.
Above them, the forest’s branches tossed in the cold autumn wind; they made a soft rushing sound that was in sharp contrast to Shannon’s violent retching.
“What’s happening?” she whispered to Simple John.
The big man’s face paled. “Magister’s throwing up bywords. Bad words. Too many small, repeated words.”
They had found Shannon in the forest not an hour ago; he had seemed healthy then. In fact, the old linguist had launched into a story about his escape from the sentinels. He kept urging Nicodemus to turn and flee from Starhaven and travel to another wizardly academy called Starfall Keep.
Apparently, the Starhaven wizards thought Nicodemus was the Storm Petrel destroyer. Shannon thought he could convince the Starfall wizards otherwise. Nicodemus, overjoyed to recover his teacher, had agreed.
As they trekked back to the Chthonic ruins, the boy had told Shannon of everything that had happened since they were separated. Deirdre had argued that before setting out for Starfall, they should first go to Gray’s Crossing to seek her goddess’s protection.
Her thinking was simple: Nicodemus’s keloid would allow Fellwroth to track them. As a result, they would never reach Starfall Keep alive unless they removed the curse from Nicodemus’s scar. Deirdre had no doubt that Boann could do exactly that. Therefore, they had to go to Gray’s Crossing. However, despite the logic of this reasoning, neither man had heeded her advice.
But now things had changed.
After returning to the Chthonic ruins, they had found Simple John roasting skinned rabbits over a fire. The moment Shannon had touched food to his lips, he had keeled over to vomit out nothing-just as he was doing now.
Deirdre turned to John. “How is it that you can talk now when before you only knew three phrases?”
The big man looked down at his hands. “It was Typhon’s curse. The demon tied sentences around parts of my mind that use language, restricted them to the three phrases.”
“Forgive me, I didn’t-” Her apology was cut short by Shannon’s renewed retching. “Nicodemus,” she asked, grateful for the excuse to change subjects, “what’s wrong with Shannon?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” the grand wizard panted while sitting up. “It’s only a consequence of having a censoring spell peeled off my head too quickly.”
“No,” Nicodemus said without taking his eyes from the old man. “It’s the nonsensical words coming out of his mouth that’s the problem.”
The old wizard narrowed his blind eyes. His tone became ironic. “So witty with your double meaning.”
Deirdre coughed. “I don’t understand.”
“His story doesn’t make sense,” Nicodemus answered with irritation. “No censoring spell placed on his head could make his stomach fill with Magnus bywords.”
Shannon closed his eyes. Deirdre could see how frail he was. The old man sighed. “I shouldn’t have come. I agonized over it for hours, backtracked again and again to make sure the monster wasn’t following me. I hoped the monster had lied about Language Prime and the infecting curse. It wasn’t a lie.”
The old man shook his head. “In the end, I sought you out, Nicodemus, because I feared you might try to rescue me. I only wanted to send you away from that creature; I never guessed the logorrhea would set in so quickly.”
Nicodemus touched the wizard’s shoulder. “Tell me what happened,” he said firmly. “I deserve the truth.”
The old man reached out with his knobby hand. Nicodemus took it with his own. “Nicodemus, it seems as if you’ve aged fifty years since last evening.”
“Magister,” John said, “we all have.”
“Perhaps you’re right, John,” Shannon said. “Very well, Nicodemus, I will tell you. But promise to run with me to Starfall Keep. We cannot go back. We cannot submit to that monster.”
When Nicodemus agreed, Shannon explained how Fellwroth-not in a golem, but in a living body-had pulled him from his cell, and how the monster had used the Emerald of Arahest to infect him with a Language Prime curse called logorrhea, which made him vomit words.
“Magister!” Nicodemus said when the wizard finished. “You made me promise something I didn’t understand. No, we will not run to Starfall. That would take until spring; you’d die before we got there.”
The old man sat up straighter. “Perhaps Fellwroth was lying when he told you that all human prophecies are false. It is still possible that you are the Halcyon; that possibility forbids you from forfeiting your life for mine. Besides, we dare not trust Fellwroth. If we submit, the monster is likely to kill me anyway.”
Nicodemus shook his head. “I won’t watch you die.”
“Selfishness,” the wizard huffed. “Surrender and you empower the demons. Your duty is to confound the Disjunction. And if that means watching me contend with the canker growing in my stomach you-”
An idea bloomed in Deirdre’s mind. “This magical canker, is it like the mundane cankers that clerics remove from elderly bodies?”
All faces turned toward her. Shannon spoke. “Clerics are spellwrights that study medicine. We wizards wouldn’t know.”
A giddy warmth spread across Deirdre’s face. “Boann found a canker once on my back. She said they happen often to avatars because we live so long. She said deities routinely cut such growths off their avatars.”
Shannon scowled. “But what ails me is not one growth. I can see the runes coming from the cursed muscles around my stomach. The canker is laced all around the organ. Boann could cut my guts into bloody rags and there’d still be more curse to cut out.”