Spellwright

The monster’s howl became a gasp as he squirmed away from Kyran and fell backward onto the cobblestones.

Somehow Kyran yanked Nicodemus to his feet. “For Deirdre,” he grunted, and cast a common language sentence into Nicodemus’s shoulder.

The now writhing golem was trying desperately to pull the burning thorny branches from his flesh. His right arm had melted down to a thin, useless stalk.

“Don’t be like me, boy.” Kyran pulled Nicodemus away. “Be anything: be wild, be saintly, be wicked. Love all or love none, but don’t be like me.”

Suddenly the war-weight gargoyle was before Nicodemus. “Get him to safety at any cost,” Kyran commanded.

Before Nicodemus could protest, the hawk-headed gargoyle grabbed hold of him and-as if he weighed no more than a kitten-hoisted him into the air. Nicodemus clutched the Index to his chest.

An inhuman scream turned Nicodemus’s eyes back to see the metal golem. The monster had extinguished the blue flames and was now on his feet and charging. A long Magnus lash glittered in his waxy hands. Kyran moved to meet the creature, blue fire again blazing from his fists.

“Kyran, no!” Nicodemus yelled.

With a vicious strike, Fellwroth brought his Magnus lash around, tearing through Kyran from shoulder to hip.

Nicodemus cried out.

The golem charged forward and raised his Magnus lash to strike at the gargoyle.

But then Nicodemus was in the air, falling at tremendous speed. His stomach clenched.

The hawk-headed gargoyle had leaped from the wall.

Nicodemus had only a glimpse of the impluvium’s glassy surface before they splashed into it. The moment the gargoyle’s feet hit water, its arms lifted Nicodemus up over its head to reduce the shock of impact. Even so, the crash of water seemed to jar the wits from Nicodemus’s mind.

His first lucid thought, ludicrously, was for the Index’s safety. He tightened his grip on the book even though the water was surely destroying its pages.

His next thought was of the golem. He opened his eyes and felt the shock of icy water on his eyeballs.

The gargoyle’s weight was fast pulling them down into the impluvium’s depths. But after craning his neck around, Nicodemus could see a blurry white column of bubbles created as the golem hit the surface.

Suddenly a stone face covered with fish scales loomed before Nicodemus. The aquatic gargoyle’s rough hands grabbed hold of Nicodemus’s robes and pulled. Then dozens more of the tiny hands set upon him, pulling him somewhere. He fought the urge to scream.

Above him the metal golem was sinking fast, its white cloak billowing in the water.

A high-pitched whine filled the water and abruptly many gargoyle hands were shoving Nicodemus into a dark hole. He fought to escape but there were too many.

They stuffed him into a small, black space. A sheet of metal closed above him and there followed a second whine.

In complete darkness, Nicodemus prepared to die.

But the whine grew louder and then Nicodemus was falling, tumbling, banging against the sides of some long tube. He shouted and felt the cold water fill his mouth. The tube began to bend and he slid along its algae-coated bottom.

Suddenly he fell into a mixture of air and water. Something was roaring like a waterfall.

He splashed down into what seemed to be a waist-deep underground river. His mouth opened and drew in long gulps of air.

He let the powerful current pull him along. Slowly the waterfall’s roar faded and he could hear things moving in the darkness above him-small, rustling things that spoke with creaking voices.

And then, without warning, he was outside. Above him shone a crystalline night sky. Around him stood a forest of dark towers. A few bats flitted about in the chilly air. Nearly two hundred feet below stretched the weed-covered gardens and stone walkways of the Chthonic Quarter.

The gargoyles had dropped him into an aqueduct, Nicodemus realized, as he floated into another tunnel. The icy current carried him northwest through several towers and across the high aqueducts until it dropped him into a massive brass cistern in the Spirish Quarter.

Whispering thanks to every deity and gargoyle he knew, Nicodemus pulled himself out of the water and ran.

At first he fled aimlessly. He feared that Fellwroth might have followed him down the aqueduct. But once sure that he had escaped, Nicodemus snuck into an old janitorial closet to catch his breath and dry off.

To his shock, he discovered that the Index was miraculously dry. He turned the codex over again and again, looking for some reason why it had not so much as a damp page.

He found no clue. But as he turned the book over, the thrill of escape faded. The keloid scars on his neck began to burn, and his hands began to shake.

At first he thought only of Kyran’s horrible death. But then he remembered the sentence the druid had cast into his shoulder before dying.

He pulled the line free and translated it.