Spellwright

As the book began flipping pages, Nicodemus looked up and muttered a prayer to Hakeem. When the Index stopped, he took a deep breath and looked down, ready to read.

But the page was blank.

BREATH SPILLED OUT of Nicodemus. His cacography had destroyed the Index. Maybe he’d vomit again.

“I had better be the Halcyon,” he mumbled to himself while pressing a hand to his belly. If he wasn’t, he’d never forgive himself for destroying such a beautiful artifact.

His hands began to tremble.

“Los damn it!” he growled. “I will not be like this.” He closed his eyes. “I won’t be weak. I won’t be crippled.”

He had to regain his determination to defeat the golem and erase his cacography. He could do it, if he was bold enough, disciplined enough. There was no time for fear or guilt.

He glared at the Index and cleared his mind of everything but the three asterisks of Shannon’s research journal. Then he placed his palm on the blank page before him.

His mind shot upward like an arrow into another plane. But rather than a starry night sky, he floated before a massive golden wall that stretched out almost endlessly in either direction. The wall itself was made of Shannon’s Numinous prose.

Nicodemus found himself staring at the journal’s first page, dated more than twenty years ago.

Simply by thinking of a later entry, Nicodemus sent the wall sliding to his left. Looking at the wall’s distant end, he saw that the text bent back to form a massive circle.

The codex-as-ring spun past in a golden blur. Then, without warning, it slammed to a dizzying, soundless stop.

Shannon’s last entry glowed before him. It was a long Numinous spell annotated by common language sentences that glowed green.

Nicodemus frowned, trying to glean the text’s purpose. The prose seemed to be that of a disspell, but it was not of the typical nonsense or antisense varieties. Its structure was that of a clamp.

That made no sense. Normally disspells sought to pull apart another spell’s argument. This disspell looked as if it would try to hold the other text together.

Nicodemus turned to the annotations. As he read, a smile spread across his face. “Magister,” he whispered. “It’s brilliant!”

It was not a disspell at all, but an attack spell adapted to hold magical prose inside of a golem. If Nicodemus cast this text on the golem, its spirit would be trapped. The author would be vulnerable.

Abruptly Shannon’s spell rushed forward to crash into Nicodemus’s mind. The rush of golden prose dazzled his eyes and then faded away to reveal the physical world.

Once again Nicodemus stood swaying before the Index.

A vivid knowledge of the anti-golem spell now burned in his brain. Shannon wanted him to have this when he took the boys up to the compluvium, Nicodemus realized. With this spell he could endanger the golem’s author without having to find its true body.

A shiver rushed up Nicodemus’s back. He needed to return to the Drum Tower.

The Index lay before him. Closing the book made the halo of purple sentences collapse back into its pages. After a long breath, he turned away and started for the door.

“Don’t you want the book?” a quick, squeaking voice said.

Nicodemus jumped back. “Who’s there?” He began to write a club of simple Magnus sentences in his biceps.

From the corner stepped a lanky gargoyle with a snow monkey’s body, a bat’s giant ears, and an owl’s bulging eyes. Nicodemus recognized the construct he had misspelled in the Stacks. “Gargoyle, did I meet you last night?”

“Petra,” she said, nodding vigorously. “Now I’m named Petra.” She grinned at him before scampering to the doorway. “Take the book. You misspelled it like me.”

“But the alarm spell will-”

“Alarm spell nothing.” The gargoyle peeled a chord of faint Numinous sentences from one side of the doorway. “Get the book and step under this.” She pulled the alarm spell free of the floor and held it up above her head.

Nicodemus stared at her for a moment, then fetched the Index. “But not even a grand wizard could move those sentences,” he said while ducking under the alarm.

She nodded and spoke rapidly. “Since you rewrote me, I can do things other constructs can’t. I can trade and bargain. I got these eyes from a night-watch gargoyle, the ears from a grunt who hunts mice. But I think I still only have secondary thoughts.” She looked up at him with childish curiosity. “What’s the difference between secondary and tertiary cognition?”

He grimaced. “Secondary constructs can’t remember anything about mortality. The academy claims they’re not fully sentient, so it’s not immoral to deconstruct them.”

The gargoyle started. One of her batlike ears flicked away and then back. “Mortality?”

Nicodemus nodded. “As in death. Secondary constructs can’t remember what it means to die.”

“But I think I still only have secondary thoughts. What is the difference between secondary and tertiary cognition?” Her tone was the same tone as before.

Nicodemus hugged the Index to his chest. “I’m sorry, Petra. I don’t know how to tell you.”