The realization felt like a kick to the stomach. At first Nicodemus couldn’t talk. His heart raced and his tongue felt as if made of leather. “I… misspell them.”
When Chimera spoke again her voice was low and doleful. “Look at the moth.” A sphere of soft white light appeared next to Nicodemus’s hand.
He looked and cried out in terror.
She had once been a delicate creature with a furry body, wide black eyes, feathery antennae. Her gossamer wings had once been pale cream punctuated with iridescent eyelike markings of yellow and black.
But the animal on Nicodemus’s finger was now a bulbous, blackened corpse. Tiny, angry cankers of necrotic black bulged across her body like nightmare parasites.
Nicodemus cried out again. With his new knowledge, he saw how his cacographic mind had rearranged the moth’s Language Prime text, causing parts of her body to grow into the monstrous swellings.
He snapped his hand back and the dead moth fell. The light winked out and Nicodemus was again floating in total darkness.
“Those were canker curses, weren’t they?” Nicodemus asked between frantic breaths. “That’s what Fellwroth did to Magister, isn’t it? The monster misspelled the Language Prime texts in Magister’s gut, and they’re growing out of control.”
Chimera didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. He knew it was true.
“I will misspell any living creature I touch,” he realized aloud. “My cacography will spawn error inside their bodies. I will spread cankers everywhere I go.” He felt as if he might vomit.
Chimera made a low huffing sound. “Not all the changes you make will lead to cankers. Many of the changes you will impart to a living creature will have no effect. Some will even be beneficial. But now…” She stopped and made the huffing sound again. “Now you see the price I have exacted from you.”
“I do,” Nicodemus said, pressing his hands to his belly. “You said I might learn how Shannon’s curse could be removed. You never said that I would be able to remove it.”
“You still have hope. Presently the cankers are spread about his stomach like gauze. If you touch him and concentrate, you might aggregate the curse into a discrete mass-”
Nicodemus interrupted. “-which Deirdre’s goddess might then remove.” Shannon might yet be saved.
“I can’t say that you’ve cheated me,” he said after a moment. “This gives Magister a chance for life. I would have agreed to your terms even if I had known that it would make me into a monster.”
A sudden idea made him start. “What if I recovered the Emerald of Arahest from Fellwroth?”
The darkness undulated. He could again feel her swimming around him. She said, “I would not want that.”
“But if I regained my ability to spell, I wouldn’t give the canker curse to everyone I touched. I could become a Language Prime spellwright like those of the Solar Empire. Chimera! Fellwroth said there is no Halcyon, but I might still use my Language Prime against the Disjunction.”
The waves in the darkness stopped. “If you regain that part of yourself, you will be useless to the struggle against the demons.”
“How can that be?”
She began to circle again. “Fellwroth wants to hide the full truth about prophecy from you.”
“The golem said all the prophecies are false.”
“All the human prophecies are false,” she corrected. “And the golem spoke truly about that. The golem also told you that the members of your family are pawns to be played by humanity or the Disjunction. In that too, he spoke part of the truth.”
“What, then, is the whole truth?”
“Humanity uses the word ‘prophecy’ as if it were synonymous with the word ‘destiny.’ Nothing is destined. Prophecy is like rain falling on a mountain. The water must flow down. It must find its course in creeks and streams and rivers. One might calculate where the water would flow in a static world. In an unchanging landscape, we might say that this drop is destined to flow into this lake, this river flow into this ocean. But the world is always changing.”
She paused to take in a long, liquid breath. “More important, the powerful may throw dams across rivers, may dig canals, may build waterwheels. And that is exactly what I have done to you, Nicodemus. I have pushed you into the river that will oppose the demons of Los. I would see you become a river-king.”
The sickening dread returned to Nicodemus. He was all too certain what she would say next. “And what metaphorical river are you speaking about?”
“You see this world as a battlefield between your kind and demonkind. But humans, gods, and demons are simply currents in a conflict of two larger forces: that of linguistic order and stasis, and that of linguistic error and change. The wizards worship order. They look to the forces that flow toward increasing order. They long for a Halcyon, a river-king of immutable language. They want everything made smooth and calm. And they fear the Petrel-a river-king of mutable language. The academy fears the storm and the change the Petrel will bring. The academy assumes that unchanging language will fend off the demons.”
Nicodemus’s hands were no longer trembling; they were clenched in anger. “And you’ve decided that it’s chaos and error that will oppose the demons? You’ve made me into a champion of mutable language?”
Chimera growled, “Life is mutable language, language that grows through error. Without error in Language Prime we are doomed. This is what I showed James Berr: I showed him that he could become the avatar of change, of disruption, of originality.”
“Originality?” Nicodemus asked through grinding teeth. “By making us into monsters?”
“That which is original creates a new origin. That which is original, by definition, must stray off the previously worn paths. It must wander; it must err. Because of me, Nicodemus, you will generate mutable language, you will become mutagenic.”
Something hot pressed against Nicodemus’s back. “ALL THAT IS CREATIVE COMES FROM ERROR!” Chimera’s voice boomed in his ear.
He spun round and tried to grab hold of her. “Damn you!” he bawled. “Damn you! You’ve made me into the Storm Petrel! You’ve made me into the monster!” His arms flailed wildly but struck nothing.
“You call that which errs grotesque?” Chimera asked from a distance. “You call the original monstrous? Then know that you’ve always been the monster. You’ve always been a cacographer. This is your true nature. This was James Berr’s true nature. He too railed against it, and it consumed him. Will you deny your own self?”
“I AM NO JAMES BERR!” Nicodemus bellowed. “I never will be. I am no force of error. I wasn’t supposed to be this way; I was cursed. I’ll recover the emerald. I’ll complete myself and become the Halcyon.”
Chimera’s response came as a low hiss. “You might yet wrest the Emerald of Arahest from the demons. That would make your life a lie. You will never escape your past as a cacographer. The emerald would make you a partial Halcyon. But know that there already is a true Halcyon.”
“Impossible!”
“Fellwroth told you of the Alliance of Divine Heretics? The renegade deities also trying to breed a true Imperial?”
Nicodemus clenched his jaw. “The monster told me.”
“Then know the Alliance has given you a half sister, your mother’s other child. She’s only a child now, but she may one day become the Halcyon. You never will.”
The rage burning in Nicodemus exploded. Summoning all his strength, he filled his body with miles of sharp Numinous sentences and lashed out in the direction of Chimera’s voice.
He shrieked as the incandescent sentence uncoiled into the darkness. The words of anger burned with a dazzling golden light.
And for a moment, outlined against the mundane blackness, there shone a creature made of darkness tangible. Her endless body spread out, looping and bulging like a worm’s. In places her skin shone slick with black slime, in others knobby branches covered in scales erupted from her serpentine flesh.