Spellwright

But Nicodemus’s tirade was too cogent. The filaments darted through Fellwroth’s disspells and unwound.

The Magnus tirade coiled around the creature’s body, binding his arms to his side and wrapping his legs together. The Numinous tirade spun a web around the monster’s mind, cutting him off from all magical language.

“Hold!” Fellwroth cried. “I yield!”

NICODEMUS STOOD OVER his spellbound foe expecting to feel triumphant. But the only emotion he felt was uncertainty.

Just what in the Creator’s name happened now?

Though tirade’s glow had faded, the remaining flamefly paragraphs provided ample light. Nicodemus looked around and saw Deirdre lying on the floor. She was struggling against the Magnus chains contracting around her neck.

Nicodemus caught the text between thumb and forefinger. Using the emerald, he gleaned the spell’s structure and edited two passages. A link snapped, and Deirdre yanked the thing from her throat.

Across the cavern, Shannon was lying motionless on the ground. Azure stood beside him, trying to pluck Fellwroth’s censoring text out of the old man’s mind.

Nicodemus thought for a moment and then extemporized a vinelike Numinous disspell. He cast it onto Shannon with an underhand toss. The disspell grew up the old man’s body and delicately removed the censoring text.

Groaning, Shannon began to stir.

A smile crept across Nicodemus’s face as his self-doubt began to fade. Without the emerald, he would have misspelled such a text within moments. He was whole now, complete.

“You cannot kill me,” a voice rasped. “Without me, Shannon will die.”

Nicodemus turned back to see a spellbound Fellwroth glaring at him with baleful red eyes.

“Only I can disspell the old wizard’s canker curses,” the creature rasped. “I spread dozens more throughout his gut. You need me. Only I can teach you how to remove them. Only I can teach you the meaning of Language Prime. You will never understand that life is made of magical text and-”

Nicodemus flicked a Magnus gag across the monster’s mouth.

He went to Shannon. The old man was on his hands and knees, vomiting another glowing pool of logorrhea bywords. Threads of blood now coiled within the silvery text.

It seemed that Fellwroth had told the truth about planting more curses in Shannon’s body.

“No,” the old linguist sputtered while trying to wave Nicodemus away. “Find out about the Disjunction. Question the monster.”

Nicodemus scowled. “Magister, hold still. I have to disspell your curses.”

“Later,” Shannon grunted. “The sentinels will be here soon. We must get Fellwroth to-”

“Magister!” Nicodemus snapped. His voice was firm though his hands had gone cold with fear. “Be quiet and hold still!”

The wizard sat on his haunches. “Very well, but hurry. We don’t have long.”

Nicodemus had to touch the old man to disspell the curses. But as he reached for his teacher’s cheek, his hand froze. It was shaking.

“I’m not the Storm Petrel anymore,” he whispered to himself. “I won’t curse him. I’m the Halcyon now.”

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He had the emerald. His doubt and fear should have vanished with his disability.

“I am the Halcyon now,” he assured himself and pressed his palm against his teacher’s cheek. The old wizard drew in a sharp breath.

Suddenly Nicodemus was looking through Shannon’s skin and sinew to the old man’s stomach. It was not pink flesh he saw, but the cyan glow of the organ’s Language Prime text. Five knobs stood out on the otherwise regular folds. They glowed brighter than the rest of the stomach.

Nicodemus set about disspelling the cankers. It was difficult work; Fellwroth had cruelly restructured Shannon’s Language Prime prose. Worse, the old man flinched every time Nicodemus made a major textual change.

“Is it done?” Shannon asked when Nicodemus removed his hand. The pain had made his face shine with sweat.

“I disspelled the worse curses around your stomach, but I saw smaller cankers on other organs. They’re not growing quickly. And I want to study them more before-”

“Disspell them later,” Shannon said while restoring Azure to her perch on his shoulder. “We haven’t long before Starhaven realizes we’re here and comes for us.”

Nicodemus helped his teacher stand. “Why do we need to worry about the other wizards?”

Shannon took a step on unsteady legs. “When the provost learns the truth about you, Nicodemus, we’ll land in the largest embroilment in the history of academic politics. If we want to avoid becoming the provost’s political prisoners, we must learn everything we can from that monster.”

Nicodemus turned to look at Fellwroth, still spellbound and lying on the floor.

Deirdre had picked herself up and gone to Boann’s ark. Fellwroth had written a Numinous shield around the object, but the avatar had forced her arms through the prose to lay her hands against the stone.

The contact seemed to be strengthening the ark; a red aura was growing around the stone and gradually deconstructing Fellwroth’s Numinous shield.