Читать книгу Spellbreaker: Book 3 of the Spellwright Trilogy - Blake Charlton - Страница 15

Nicodemus and the neodemon wearing his daughter’s face stared at each other with incomprehension. “Your daughter’s face?” the River Thief asked.

“You’re …” Nicodemus stuttered. “You’re impersonating her?”

“Leandra Weal? The Warden of Ixos?” the River Thief asked. “She has my face?”

“You have hers.”

The River Thief’s eyes narrowed with sudden comprehension. “So …” All six of her hands tightened around their knives.

Nicodemus dodged just as the neodemon’s right uppermost arm flicked back and then forward. Her throwing dagger passed within an inch of his shoulder as he misspelled the last of censoring texts from his mind. The River Thief leapt forward with a three-arm knife thrust. Nicodemus danced back but not before her lowermost knife cut into his hip.

“Stop!” Nicodemus cried and pulled a blasting spell from his stomach. He flicked it at the neodemon’s feet with his right hand while using his left to cast a shielding spell on the deck before him.

A wall of protective indigo words shot up to Nicodemus’s waist. The River Thief lunged again, this time leading with the kris in her mid-left hand. But Nicodemus ducked below his shielding spell just as his blasting spell detonated. A shockwave momentarily knocked every thought from Nicodemus’s mind and set his ears ringing.

In the next instant, he found himself staggering to his feet. Two sailors were charging, knives raised. “Rory!” Nicodemus called as he reached to his hip and pulled free a coruscation of paragraphs that leapt from his skin to form a two-handed textual sword. “Rory, now!”

To Nicodemus’s relief and horror, the deck before the charging sailors exploded into an array of razor-thin spikes each five or six feet in length. The giant splinters punched straight into the sailors’ legs and bellies.

The night erupted into screams. Nicodemus looked around and saw that every one of the River Thief’s sailors had been similarly impaled by a nightmare blossoming of splinters.

A booming crash turned Nicodemus’s eyes starboard. His blasting text had knocked the River Thief into the gunnel; there, Rory had made the wood come alive with spikes, one or two of which had pierced the neodemon’s side but most had broken harmlessly. Large barklike growths had emerged from the gunnel to envelop three of the neodemon’s arms. But the blue-green aura surrounding the River Thief ignited into flames and burned her restraints.

Suddenly, the barge lurched and Nicodemus nearly lost his balance. A fountain of water erupted from the river behind the neodemon as she tore herself free of the barklike bindings.

“Goddess, wait!” Nicodemus yelled. “It doesn’t have to be like this!”

The neodemon turned toward him. Her eyes burned with a merciless white light. She advanced, more carefully now. The barge shook again and Nicodemus stumbled. The River Thief danced forward, slashing with first her left middle arm then all of her right arms. Nicodemus met the first slash with his textual sword then jumped back to avoid the other blades. With a yell and downward slash, he severed her right uppermost arm at the elbow.

Shrieking, the neodemon lurched backward. Nicodemus pressed his attack and knocked free another of her knives. He was about to thrust into her gut when she jumped away and fell. A roar of thrashing water erupted from somewhere behind Nicodemus. The barge lurched again.

“Goddess, yield! It doesn’t have to be like this!” Nicodemus yelled again.

“There’s no safe place!” She raised two of her hands in clenched fists and suddenly the deck bucked. Nicodemus fell forward.

“The hull’s cracking!” yelled a muffled voice that Nicodemus recognized as Rory’s. He glimpsed the druid’s white robes as the man pulled himself up from the hatch. “Nico, she’s using her godspell to batter the ship. If we go under, we all die!”

The River Goddess hissed. With one of her arms she grabbed Nicodemus’s foot and with the other she started to drive a dirk into his calf. But where she touched him, the blue-green fire of her aura vanished as his cacography misspelled her godspell.

She shrieked and pulled her hand back. Her knife had not sunk more than an inch into Nicodemus’s calf.

Nicodemus had lost the sword text, but he was close enough now that it did not matter. He lurched forward and caught one of the River Thief’s wrists. Her cyan aura winked out where he touched and she screamed.

“Goddess, you have to yield!” Again the boat heaved. Nicodemus and the neodemon slid across a deck to slam into the gunnel.

“We’re taking on water!” Rory yelled.

“Goddess!” Nicodemus yelled. “Yield!”

“I cannot,” the River Thief gasped while trying to free her arm from Nicodemus’s grasp. With two of her other arms, she grabbed the top of the gunnel.

“Don’t let her into the water!” Rory cried just as the neodemon shrieked, “Let me go!”

“Yield!” Nicodemus bellowed.

She continued to struggle, all her arms flailing. Something sharp cut into Nicodemus’s shoulder. “There can be peace no more!” the neodemon yelled. “I see her now. She will end this world!”

Nicodemus caught another of her hands. Their faces were now inches apart; her blank white eyes stared into his green ones. “Peace no more,” she whispered, and then, instead of trying to escape, she wrapped all her arms and her legs around Nicodemus. The air around them crackled as his cacography misspelled her.

“Wait,” Nicodemus cried. “Wait, you—” He needed to know why she was wearing his daughter’s face and if she truly was a demon of the Ancient Continent. But the River Thief grasped him tighter. In a blaze of blue and green scintilla, she dissolved into light and air.

Nicodemus found himself lying in darkness, bleeding onto the deck.