Spellwright

Nicodemus’s keloid began to burn. Shannon had wrapped the scars with distorting Numinous spells. Nevertheless, he watched as a sphere of Language Prime flew away from him in all directions. The broadcast was diffuse; it wouldn’t reveal his precise location to Fellwroth. But it would tell the monster that he was on the move.

Thinking about this made Nicodemus’s heart beat faster. He closed his eyes and focused on recovering the emerald-of transforming himself from Petrel to Halcyon-until his icy determination returned.

Just then Shannon had to pause to vomit silvery logorrhea bywords.

When they continued their trek, Shannon showed him how to write several common language sentences around the Index so that it would float in a slow circle around the younger man’s waist.

“When wizards must fight,” the old linguist said gravely, “we float our spellbooks like this.”

A moment later, Deirdre returned with auspicious news: there was no sign of wizards in Gray’s Crossing. She had learned from a town watchman that shortly after sundown all the black-robes had run up to Starhaven.

After another quarter hour walking, the town came into view around a bend. It was not much to look at: a huddle of round Lornish cottages clustered around two inns, a smithy, a fuller, and a small common. At the hamlet’s center sat the intersection of the Westernmost Road and the smaller road that ran up to Starhaven. Most of the inhabitants were farmers or shopkeepers who sold to the wizards.

With Deirdre leading the way, the party hurried off the road and into the trees. Cautiously, they picked their way so as to emerge behind the stables of a dilapidated inn named the Wild Crabtree.

Deirdre hustled them into the back of the building and up a flight of rickety stairs. Shannon wrote a flamefly spell and scattered the incandescent paragraphs around the party so as to light the way.

“The inn’s owner is a Highlander,” Deirdre whispered. “He rents the top floor to Dralish smugglers who buy weapons in Spires and run them down to the Highland rebels. There’s a secret compartment in the floor where they hide the blades.”

She stopped before a door. “Be quiet now; I have to let the other devotees of Boann know we are friends.” She knocked twice and then froze.

Her hand had pushed the door open slightly. Inside it was dark and silent.

“Careful,” Shannon whispered, a spherical Magnus spell appearing in his hand.

Deirdre drew the greatsword from her back and then pushed the door wide to let the light from Shannon’s flamefly spell fall into the dark room.

Peering past her shoulder, Nicodemus saw-sprawled across the floor-a motionless body.

THERE WERE EIGHT dead men, three women. Not a drop of blood on any of them.

Shannon found a slowly deconstructing Numinous paragraph lodged behind the ear of one victim. “Fellwroth,” he said, inspecting the text. “Attacked maybe twenty hours ago.”

The three connected rooms were spacious and sparsely furnished. Nicodemus walked into the farthest room and noticed a bowl of stew sitting on a table. “The monster took them by surprise,” he noted, looking at the fat congealing at the bowl’s edge. “No sign of struggle.”

John went to each of the bodies and closed their staring eyes.

Meanwhile Nicodemus studied the ceiling. With his new knowledge of the original languages, he could see the cyan auras of rats as they scurried among the rafters.

Deirdre stood unmoving by the door. Her lips pressed white against each other. “It makes no sense,” she said. “There’s no way Fellwroth could have known the ark was here.”

“Deirdre,” Shannon said from across the room, “I am sorry for your loss. I don’t know if you knew these souls well, but-”

“Boann’s ark is missing,” she interjected. “I must get it back!”

The grand wizard looked at her. “What does the ark look like? Could it have been hidden?”

“It is a standing stone, six feet tall, two wide, two deep. The edges are smooth. It is a water ark-most of the year it rests in one of the Highland rivers sacred to Boann. Three parallel lines flow down from its top; they symbolize her rivers.”

Nicodemus looked at Deirdre. Something about the ark’s description stirred his memory.

Deirdre began pacing around the room and looking down at the wooden floor. “There is a chance it was hidden. The tavern’s owner built a secret compartment in the floor. The other devotees may have concealed the ark in it.”

She bent down and knocked on the wooden planks. “We have to be quiet. But we can find the compartment by listening for an echoing knock. One of the druids told me so.”

Again something pulled at Nicodemus’s memory. His hands were wringing each other. He glared at the tattooed things and willed them to stop.

Both John and Shannon had joined Deirdre in rapping softly on the floor. “If we can’t find the ark,” Shannon said, “then we have no choice but to flee for Starfall Keep.”

“I won’t leave my goddess behind,” Deirdre insisted.

Shannon shook his head. “But if Fellwroth has stolen the ark, it could be anywhere.”