Читать книгу Spellbound: Book 2 of the Spellwright Trilogy - Blake Charlton - Страница 17

An unseen wartext blasted the ghost’s right arm into a cloud of golden text. He felt no pain, only a hot rush of fear. Behind him, Nicodemus yelled something.

The ghost jumped left, thought of the wall as the ground, kicked off of it, and flew down the dark hall. Behind him, a detonating wartext filled the air with shards of plaster and stone. Most passed harmlessly through the ghost, but a few tore Magnus sentences in his feet.

After landing in the bright outer hallway, the ghost tried to dash away, but the damaged prose in his soles uncoiled. He slipped and fell, sinking knee-deep into the floor.

Desperately, he pulled his feet out of the floorboards and tried to repair the soles. The severed paragraphs on the stump of his right arm were hemorrhaging language.

The sound of footsteps made him look up.

Nicodemus, standing at the edge of the hallway’s darkness, cocked his hand back and cast something at the ghost. No doubt it was a wartext written in the tattooed language Nicodemus had learned from the kobolds. The ghost flinched, expecting to be shattered into sentence fragments.

But nothing happened.

Nicodemus yelled again. Suddenly the ghost realized that the hallway’s bright light had deconstructed Nicodemus’s wartext. The chthonic languages functioned only in darkness. Wasting no time, the ghost repaired his feet and pulled himself out of the floor.

Nicodemus ran forward. Daylight or no, the boy was still a cacographer, and if he touched the ghost he could misspell him into nothing.

The ghost dashed down the hallway with inhuman speed. He leapt into the air and kicked off the walls and ceiling to make himself a more difficult target for any wizardly wartext Nicodemus might cast.

When the ghost saw the sunlight pouring through the windows, he stopped to look back. Nico was out of sight and far behind. Quickly he edited the stump of his right hand so that it would stop hemorrhaging prose. How much text did he have left?

Frowning, the ghost realized he could have escaped Nicodemus by falling through the floor or dashing through a wall. If he was going to survive, he had to start thinking like a ghost.

The ghost’s frown deepened with a second realization: he would have seen any wizardly wartext Nicodemus had cast at him. Could it be the boy hadn’t used either wizardly language?

Footsteps sounded down the hall. Nicodemus came sprinting into view. The ghost stood, waiting to see if the boy’s hand would shine silvery or golden.

But Nico only lunged at him. The ghost dodged left, partially hiding in a thick stone wall. Nicodemus turned and tried to grab him. Shannon drew himself completely into the wall and then stepped out a few paces away.

Nicodemus looked at him, panting. There was no sign of Numinous or Magnus in his body. He wasn’t even going to try.

“You left the valley too soon!” the ghost would have said if his throat could have made noise.

Again Nicodemus lunged. Shannon jumped over him. “Creator damn it all, Nico!” the ghost silently cursed. “You left the valley too soon!” He peeled a Numinous sentence from the stump of his right arm and edited it so it would read YOU LEFT TOO SOON! The ghost waited for Nicodemus to turn around before casting it in his face.

Nicodemus jerked his head back and then pulled the golden sentence from his cheek. The instant it touched the boy, the line began to misspell. By the time Nicodemus had completed a translation, it read YU LEAFT TUH VALEE TWO SOON!

A chill filled the ghost. Nicodemus’s cacography in Numinous had worsened dramatically; he was now essentially illiterate in the wizardly languages.

Nicodemus leapt for him again, and again he missed. With a wrist flick, the ghost cast a question: “Why did you leave the valley?”

Nicodemus threw another punch. Shannon dodged left and threw another line: “WHY? TELL ME WHY, DAMN YOU!”

Nicodemus swung again. Shannon jumped back and was about to cast another sentence when he saw the pain in the boy’s eyes.

Shannon stopped.

“I couldn’t watch you die!” Nicodemus growled. “You’re dying. The cankers. They’re killing you. Any day now, you’ll die. I had to try to get the emerald and cure you. Damn it, I had to try!”

The ghost swallowed. He had a good idea why Nicodemus was trying to deconstruct him. But he needed to hear the boy say it. He wrote another question: “But why deconstruct me, the ghost?”

Nicodemus swung again. Shannon ducked under the blow and repeated the question: “Why try to deconstruct me?” And then added, “Let me be one with my author before he dies!”

Nicodemus laughed bitterly. “You don’t know what you are. Typhon’s agents took you from us. He’s had you for a year. If the demon has let you free, it’s because he’s using you against us.”

The ghost tensed, ready to dodge another attack. But Nicodemus only glared at him, his chest heaving. “Typhon has rewritten you. You’re not Magister Shannon’s ghost.”

“I AM Shannon’s ghost!” he threw in response. “I’m meant to be one with him! Trust me, please.”

Nicodemus shook his head. “You’re just the demon’s weapon, like Deirdre was back in Starhaven.”

A realization sent a chill through the ghost. He didn’t actually know if the demon had rewritten him or not. He did not feel rewritten … but how could he know? The demon was masterful enough to rewrite him so as to hide what he had done. “Oh,” the ghost said to himself in shock. “Oh!”

Nicodemus tensed and seemed about to strike out again when it shot through the window. White sailcloth and steel flashed in the sunlight. The warkite snaked toward Nicodemus. The boy ducked under the talons and thrust his arms into the construct’s belly. Instantly, the warkite went as limp as a tablecloth. His cacographic touch had misspelled its every sentence.

But just as Nicodemus tossed the disspelled kite aside, another flash of white shone at the window. More warkites. The constructs were reacting to the chthonic runes tattooed on Nicodemus’s skin. They perceived him as a foreign spell more dangerous than Shannon-the-text.

The ghost didn’t waste the opportunity. With a powerful jump, he flew up and through the ceiling.

He found himself on the floor of another hallway. In this one stood seven green-robed hierophants, men and women. They had all removed their veils. One had undone his turban. They were talking, or at least trying to talk. Their mouths produced only aphasic gibberish. Their eyes were wide with confusion or fear. Some were trying to communicate with gestures.

The ghost shivered. Something powerful must be moving through the sanctuary to spread an aphasia curse.

But the ghost had to get away from Nicodemus. After the Magnus sentences in his feet recovered from passing through the floor, the ghost ran down the hall in the direction of the sun. As he went, he looked out the window but saw only pale blue sky and winding city alleys. The warkites were not following him. He jumped up through the ceiling to another floor and kept running.

Then something seemed to go wrong in the ghost’s chest, as if some vital passage had gone missing. It was as if … where he should have had a heart there was only hollowness.

He stopped. His chest was heaving even though he had no need to breathe. He moved to cover his face but had only one hand.

Pain flashed through him. Where his arm should have been there was only pulsing agony. He fell to his knees, let himself sink into the floor. His mind was reeling with fear. His text had been horribly depleted. How much longer could he survive outside a necropolis?

But the worst of it was that his author did not want him. His author distrusted him, and Nicodemus had tried to deconstruct him. He might not be himself. He might be a demon’s tool.

The ghost’s chest began to shake. The pain of his lost arm had dissipated, but the hollowness in his chest had expanded. The ghost felt a longing for his author so keen and agonizing it was like that of the abandoned child. He remembered with agonizing clarity when Astrophell politics had taken Shannon away from his wife and young son; both woman and child were now long dead. That pain was like this pain in its sharpness.

The ghost curled into a ball, sinking entirely into the floor. The pain in his hands, feet, and ears was a welcome distraction.

He shook all over. Though he was now contained within wood and stone, he took long ragged breaths. For what felt like hours, he wept without tears.

Slowly, emotional exhaustion set in. He seemed to sleep. When his thoughts became clear again, he considered his situation. He had no way to prove to his author that Typhon had not rewritten him. Therefore, proof had to be found. But how?

Typhon had stolen him from his author and then removed some of his memories. The notes in the library claimed “our memories are in her” and instructed him to find Cleric Francesca DeVega.

The note’s false claim that living Shannon had been murdered … that was mysterious and troubling.

The ghost climbed out of the floor and began searching for the infirmary. But as he peered through doors and down stairwells, the hollowness in his chest returned. This time it was accompanied by fear so strong he felt nauseated.

Though the ghost tried not to think about it, some part of him knew that the being who had placed him in that library, the being who had written a lie about his author being murdered, might very well be the demon Typhon.