Spellwright

“The runes of Language Prime are extremely weak. They can affect little outside a living body. No human synaesthetic reaction is sensitive enough to detect them.” She paused. “But you’re not considering what will happen now that you know the Creator’s Language. Think harder. Your mind rewrites nearby eugraphic languages-that is how your childhood dreams wrote the night terrors that saved you from Fellwroth. But the original languages are not eugraphic. They are cacographic; their spellings are redundant and illogical. What happens when you touch text written in a cacographic language?”

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?”