The stasis spell manifested itself as a column of slowly rising Magnus passages that entrapped a man as firmly as tree sap imprisoned a bug; something Nicodemus seemed to be discovering. The upward current of sticky words had lifted the boy four feet into the air and was slowly rotating him. Currently a black-robed back faced Fellwroth.
Fellwroth began to write a Numinous disspell down the sand golem’s right leg. “I will edit you from the stasis, boy, so don’t squirm-” He jerked back in shock. “You!”
Staring down with a lopsided smirk was the big male cacographer whose mind Typhon had distorted.
“What is meant by this?” Fellwroth growled.
The big man’s mouth quivered. “Siii… Simple John show himself to north sentinels on road. T-th-they never have see Nico, so they believe John when he says he is Nico.” The big man exhaled as if saying so much exhausted him.
Fellwroth resisted the urge to grind the golem’s sandy teeth. “Don’t waste my time, oaf. If the sentinels come before I have answers, I’ll rip you in half.”
The cacographer started to stutter and struggle, but the stasis text kept the oaf spellbound. Fellwroth waited impatiently for what felt like a quarter hour before speaking. “All right, calm down. I won’t hurt you if you tell me what I need to know.”
The big man swallowed. “Nnnn… Nico sends John as messenger. Nnnn… Nico wants to have proof that red-eyes man is… t-t-telling the truth. Then Nico submit to… submit-t-t… to red-eyes man.” The oaf stopped to pant.
A soft crunch in his jaw filled the golem’s mouth with sand. “Blood and damnation,” he cursed and spat the sand out. He had been unconsciously grinding the golem’s teeth. “So what does the boy want?”
The oaf took a few breaths. “Red-eyes man is to go t-t-to place in Gray’s Town… no, Gray’s Village… no, Gray’s Crowing…”
“Gray’s Crossing,” Fellwroth snarled. “Hurry!”
The cacographer nodded. “Red-eyes-man is to find Mag-g-gister Shannon and is to fix broken person part of Shhhh… Shannon. Nico will be-”
A ratlike gargoyle scurried into the stable. “Fear! Fear! Took too long to reach you. Had to ask other gargoyles where to reach you.”
Fellwroth glared at the construct. “What is it? What did you hear?”
“Fighting in the Spindle!” the thing yelped. “Our protections torn apart! Living body under threat!”
Suddenly the stables rang with loud, hearty laughter.
Fellwroth looked up at the big man’s smiling face. “Fool! So willing to believe in my disability? You truly think I talk that slowly?”
A wordless, animal shriek escaped from Fellwroth’s sandy throat. The monster lashed out with the half-written disspell. But the unfinished text was too dull. It bounced off the stasis spell. Worse, the force of the rebound snapped the sand arm off at the shoulder.
“WEAL!” Fellwroth shrieked, “I’LL TEAR YOUR THROAT OUT FOR THIS, WEAL!”
Fellwroth wrenched his spirit from the sand golem and sent it racing upward toward the Spindle Bridge.
FELLWROTH’S TRUE EYES snapped open to see Deirdre. Her rusted greatsword swung up above her head and then flashed downward with all her divine might.
Fellwroth flinched, but the blade came to a clanging halt as it struck the Magnus shield written above the black table.
Light from a hundred flamefly paragraphs illuminated the cavern. Previously Fellwroth had seen the place only in the dark.
The low ceiling sparkled with quartz chips. The cavern widened only a little way into the mountain. The floor was smooth and gray.
Boann’s ark-encased in Numinous-stood at the head of the table. Farther into the mountain, the cavern descended into myriad kobold tunnels. In the other direction loomed the entrance to the Spindle’s tunnel. A patch of starry sky shone through a hole the humans had torn into the tunnel’s roof.
With another screech, Deirdre’s greatsword crashed down onto the textual shield above Fellwroth. A plate-like paragraph buckled under the strain.
Suddenly the world flashed full of golden light, and Fellwroth realized that Shannon was standing beside Deirdre and dashing disspells against the shield. The blue parrot sat on the old linguist’s shoulder.
More terrifying, Nicodemus-standing at the table’s foot-was jamming his fingers into the shield. Blurry rings of misspelled prose radiated out from the whelp’s touch.
Fellwroth bellowed out his rage and terror. The attack had almost worked. If the big oaf had distracted him for a few moments more, the three humans would have broken through his shield and slain his body.
But now his left hand closed around the Emerald of Arahest. With a flash of heat, the gem bestowed the ability to craft infinitely detailed prose without error. When touching the artifact, a spellwright did not fear misspelling even when extemporizing the most complex text.
With a savage yawp, he punched a fist of incendiary Magnus sentences against the protective shield. The spell exploded outward with enough force to knock the three humans onto their backs.
Fellwroth leaped off the table and turned.
The avatar was the first to attack. She launched herself across the stone table and thrust out her greatsword.
Extemporizing through the emerald, Fellwroth wrote a fine Magnus lace and cast it from floor to ceiling.
Deirdre’s sword point stuck into the mesh. The blade snapped a single sentence but then turned. Shock widened the girl’s eyes as a force invisible to her twisted the sword out of her hands. Her body crashed into the mesh. The spell stretched but did not break. She fell awkwardly onto her shoulder.
Fellwroth wrote a thick Magnus chain and tied it around her neck.
Gasping, the woman grabbed the spell and heaved against it. Only the divine strength in her arms kept the text from crushing her neck. But that strength would not last long.
The cave flashed brighter. Fellwroth looked up to see Shannon cast a many-bladed Numinous spell. The parrot on the linguist’s shoulder screamed.
Though impressive for a human text, the spell posed no real threat. With a wave of his hand, Fellwroth extemporized a spray of Numinous disspells that ripped Shannon ’s attack into fragments.
Shannon kneeled and slammed his fist against the ground, casting a tundern spell. Like subterranean lightning, the silvery bolt shot through the stone floor. It was meant to erupt into a geyser of crushing sentences. But Fellwroth stamped his foot on the incoming spell and shattered the text as if it were made of glass.
With a short laugh, Fellwroth wrote a thin Magnus net and with a wrist flick cast the thing around Shannon ’s stomach. As the spell tightened, the wizard had to turn away to vomit out the logorrhea bywords that had filled his belly.
Through the emerald’s power, Fellwroth could see that the canker curse in the wizard’s stomach had consolidated. That would not do. Fellwroth cast a net of Language Prime that scattered twenty new cankers throughout the old man’s gut.
With another flick, Fellwroth cast a Numinous censor spell around Shannon ’s brain. When the text dug into the wizard’s mind, the old man collapsed and left his parrot to flap in short circles.
Something struck Fellwroth’s head. The world spun for a moment but then stopped, leaving only a ringing in his left ear. Some kind of subtextualized censoring spell? Fellwroth turned to see Nicodemus’s face twist with rage. The boy had written several white sentences around an ancient codex and was using them to float the open book beside him.
The whelp must have attempted a censoring spell in a language Fellwroth did not know. “So here you are in all your glory, Nicodemus. The heir to the Imperial family and you’ve got nothing to write but cacographic mush.”
The boy pulled back his right fist as if to make a second attempt. Amused, Fellwroth raised his palm, ready to disspell the boy’s text into nonsense.