Spellwright

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.”