Spellwright

Abruptly Devin thumped her lunch bowl down on the table and sat next to him. “Heard the news?” she asked. “That why you look like you’ve seen Erasmus’s ghost?”

Nicodemus dropped his spoon with a wooden clatter. “Dev, thank heaven you’re here! I need to tell…” his voice died as he remembered his promise to Shannon not to trust anyone. “… need to tell you that I taught my first class on spellwriting. It went well. But the news was so shocking that… I don’t know how to feel.”

“None of us does,” she grumbled, sinking a battered wooden spoon into her stew. “Nico, do you think Starhaven takes care of us?”

“Of course. Most likely we’d have magical literacy permanently censored from our minds if we were in Astrophell.”

“But maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Do you think common folk are distressed by a fire in Trillinon? What’s foreign news to a pig farmer?”

“But, Dev, you’d be illiterate.”

She shrugged. “I don’t read anything but janitorial texts. Sometimes I feel like we’re just ants in an anthill, crippled ants at that. And here comes King Ant now.” She nodded at the raised stage on the far side of the hall. Several deans and foreign spellwrights were standing around a long table.

The provost, sitting in a high-backed wooden chair, floated onstage. Even from his present distance, Nicodemus could make out the muris spell billowing under the arch-wizard’s seat. If he had been closer, he would have seen an obscenely old man who had been half folded over by time. He also would have seen the grizzled old raccoon the provost kept as a familiar.

“Behold,” Devin intoned, “Provost Ferran Montserrat: the only independent mind in this stone heap. That man doesn’t answer to anybody but our god and his avatar. The rest of us are bound, antlike, to his will.”

Nicodemus watched the provost float to the table’s head. With surprising dexterity, the ancient arch-wizard landed his chair and picked up a fork. The deans and their guests sat and began eating.

“Everything is so damn complicated,” Nicodemus grumbled before swearing softly, “blood of Los.”

“Piss and blood in a silver bowl!” Devin hissed. “I forgot!”

Nicodemus jumped slightly in his seat. “Forgot what?”

Devin’s pale face flushed red as she visibly struggled to contain a salvo of obscenity. “Two days ago Magistra Highsmith caught me napping on duty. The old hussy of a historian is making me give a short lecture about Los to the rest of the girls on janitorial. It’s her idea of a penance. The old shrew knows cacographers never study theology. I was supposed to look it up but didn’t.”

Nicodemus raised his eyebrows. “When do you lecture?”

“In half an hour,” Devin said with a glare that dared him to chide her. Fortunately, he knew enough to keep his mouth shut. When she spoke again, it was in a calmer voice. “Nico, tell me everything you know about Los.”

“I’m a cacographer too, you know. I never took theology either.”

“But you memorize everything Shannon says and fawn-”

“All right, all right. Back on the ancient continent there was a golden age when the Solar Empire… and that’s not the Neosolar Empire, which formed on this continent. Anyway, the original Solar Empire existed in peace with the gods. But someone committed a grave sin that enabled Los, then a powerful earth god, to become the first demon.”

“But what sin-”

Nicodemus shrugged. “Every religion has a different answer. Probably no one’s right; probably that knowledge was lost when our ancestors crossed the ocean. As wizards we hold to no belief and so are not bound to a religion or kingdom. All you need to know is that Los took a third of the deities to Mount Calax and turned them into demons. He made an army of all the demons and called it the Pandemonium. That’s where the word comes from: Pan, all, demonium, demons. So when we say the class was pandemonium we’re using hyperbole to-”

“Blasted pisser-” Devin cut herself short and calmed down. “Nico, I get it. Could you just give me the history without your linguistic ramblings?”

Nicodemus grumbled about history and linguistic ramblings being the same thing before continuing. “So after Los formed the Pandemonium, there was a war between deities and demons called the Apocalypse. When it became clear the demons would win, the human deities built huge Exodus ships to cross the ocean. Somehow-no one’s sure how-a group of human heroes turned Los into stone. This bought the ships enough time to get out to sea. The demons, being bound to the ancient continent, couldn’t follow. Then a powerful wind called the Maelstrom scattered the Exodus ships. That’s why each of the current landfall kingdoms has people of different shapes and colorings.”

Devin narrowed her eyes. “In ancient kingdoms everyone looked the same?”

“More or less. Certainly someone like me with black hair and olive skin would not have come from the same kingdom as someone with your red hair and freckles.”