Читать книгу Spellbound: Book 2 of the Spellwright Trilogy - Blake Charlton - Страница 11

Shannon ran to the window and thrust his hand into a sunbeam. The light illuminated his tawny skin, his knobby fingers, and the wooden floorboards below them.

His flesh was slightly transparent.

He grabbed his left pinky and pulled. The digit shone golden. With a firm tug, he unraveled the finger into a cylindrical cloud of swirling prose.

He wasn’t Shannon, not technically; he was a text.

He released the golden words, and they snapped back into his transparent pinky. He felt his face and found a short beard and mustache, a hooked nose and a cascade of white dreadlocks.

He was a spell written to look like Shannon, to believe he was Shannon. He pressed a hand to his chest. He didn’t need to breathe, but his lungs were heaving. He was a ghost: a textual copy of Shannon.

“Creator be merciful!” he whispered, or tried to whisper. His throat was made of golden Numinous runes, which could affect light and text but not the mundane world. “Creator,” he tried to say again but made no sound.

Questions exploded through his mind. How had his author died? Why was he in Avel? And, most pressingly, how was he going to survive?

Only living muscle or a divine body could produce magical runes, and as a ghost he had a finite number of subspells. His every action required a small textual expenditure. To counteract this depletion, wizardly ghosts dwelled in restorative necropoli, found in wizardly academies. If he did not enter a necropolis in the next few days, the ghost would deconstruct. He’d die. Again.

Something was horribly wrong.

The distant wailing grew louder. Then there came a banging, as if doors were being slammed. The ghost had to figure out what was going on. And he had to do so quickly.

He looked at the door. Before the portal lay the remaining sentence fragments.

Odd.

Once broken, Numinous text usually dissolved.

He went to the scrambled sentence. Its author had written the runes in interlocking groups, which had kept them from deconstructing but had also made their parent spell brittle.

The fragments seemed to have broken into discrete piles. He went to the largest and assembled it into the sentence, find Cleric Francesca DeVega. Only she … He included the other fragments. Only she can help you find your murderer.

Though he produced no saliva, the ghost swallowed. His author was not only dead but also murdered? But when?

If a ghost was in its author’s body at the moment of death, the ghost became incoherent. That meant that the ghost had been removed before the murder.

But had his author truly been murdered? Who had written this Numinous warning?

A long rune fragment had fallen under the table. He crawled to it and translated the runes into … must warn Nicodemus!

The ghost groaned soundlessly as a thousand buried memories of Nicodemus Weal surfaced. He remembered the cacographic boy in Starhaven, the unexplained deaths, the hunting for and being hunted by Fellwroth, the emerald, the demon, and … the disease.

That was the sharpest memory of all. During their game of predator-and-prey, Fellwroth had used the emerald to cast a canker curse into Shannon, creating a disease that had begun to slowly kill him. When Nicodemus had briefly possessed the emerald, the boy had slowed the cankers. In the Heaven Tree Valley, it looked as if Shannon would recover. But as the seasons passed, his health had begun to worsen.

The ghost closed his eyes as he remembered his life in the valley. He’d tried to help Nicodemus overcome his disability, but the boy had only become more cacographic. More distressing, Nicodemus’s affinity for the kobolds’ tattooed language had led him to disregard the wizardly ones. Unduly impressed by his growing strength, Nicodemus had wanted to pursue Typhon. Shannon had disagreed, and they argued bitterly.

The ghost cursed. Shannon had not died of the canker curse; he had been murdered. “I told the boy he had to train longer,” the ghost tried to growl but made no sound.

Suddenly, the ghost’s head began to ache. One instant, it felt as if the Shannon-who-had-lived had been a different person. The next instant, the ghost felt as if he was Shannon-who-had-lived: he had all his memories, all his emotions. Was he his author? Perhaps not his author’s body, but his mind?

But there was no time for philosophical pondering. Closing his eyes, the ghost tried to remember when he and Nicodemus had left the Heaven Tree Valley. But it was no good; he had no memory of leaving the valley. This wasn’t like before when the memories felt buried. These memories were gone.

The ghost looked for more sentence fragments. Closer to the door, he found a pile of golden runes that he translated into Hide in books if the constructs discover you. But whatever you do DON’T …

Spellwrights referred to capitalized script as shouting, and the shouted DON’T alarmed Shannon.

DON’T what?

He saw no more shouting nearby, but by lowering his head to the ground, he saw that four rune fragments had slipped under the door and into a hallway.

He examined the door. Solid redwood. As a ghost, he was written almost entirely in Numinous and therefore couldn’t open the door. Experimentally, he put a hand on the wood. His fingers disappeared into it.

So he lowered his head and walked through the door. Pain flared in his feet, and buzzing insects seemed to burrow into his ears. Some part of his inner ear—likely the subspell that sensed vibrating air as sound—must be written in Magnus, a silvery language that could affect mundane objects but not light or magical text.

The buzzing passed, and the ghost found himself standing in a hallway: wooden floor, a long white wall with arched windows. Outside shone red-tiled roofs and sandstone minarets. The gutters ran with thin streams of rainwater.

The ghost’s feet continued to ache, and suddenly he sank an inch into the floor. Alarmed, he picked up one foot and saw its sole glinted with Magnus. Passing through the door had frayed the silver prose. He sank another inch and fell sideways, expecting to tumble through the floor.

But his hip struck the wooden boards, allowing him to pull his feet out of the floor. Confused, the ghost examined his hip and discovered that two silvery sentences had coiled there. He pressed his hand to the floor and watched a Magnus sentence shoot into his palm to allow him to push against the floor.

At last the ghost understood: his meager Magnus text, which gave him weight, distributed itself so that he could push against what he considered the ground.

The frayed prose on his feet seemed to be repairing itself. When the processes looked complete, the ghost rose into a crouch. Now his feet worked fine. He was about to stand when he saw the Numinous rune sequences that had slipped under the door: VETHISR, OOMUNTIL, LEA, DARK.

He picked them up. The period after DARK meant it should go last. So VETHISROOMUNTILLEADARK? He added spaces. VE THIS ROOM UNTIL LEA DARK? Close, but not quite. He looked back at the beginning of the sentence … and flinched.

He pulled out first the LEA then the VE, put them at the front of the fragment, connected it to the beginning, added spaces: But whatever you do DON’T LEAVE THIS ROOM UNTIL DARK.

Standing, he looked around to discover why he should not have left.

The hallway held only a cold breeze. But outside, on the roof, a long shadow slipped across the red tiles.

He looked up into the sky.

Its long, headless body was as white and flat as newly bleached paper. Sunlight glinted on its four sets of steel talons.