But the monster was still too quick; he squirmed back and away, holding the weapon above her short reach. With a hiss, the thing slashed with the sword across her side.
As the blade rasped against her rib bones, the world exploded into blackness. Deirdre leaped away onto her back. The creature tried to stand, but she kicked her boot toe into his neck. With a strangled cry, the thing toppled backward. Deirdre regained her feet and slammed the bar down on the creature’s shin.
She fled.
NICODEMUS BLINKED. “You were blinded by Language Prime?”
The grand wizard rubbed his eyes wearily. “The story starts in Astrophell. I was a player in the game of factions then and a little arrogant. I fell in love with the magically illiterate grandniece of Astrophell’s provost. When I got her with child, we married in secret.”
Nicodemus nodded mutely.
The old man continued. “My enemies discovered my pregnant wife and used her to create scandal. It became a rallying point for the malcontent factions-mostly those that wanted the Order to exert more influence over the kingdoms. Hoping to hide the scandal, the provost announced his plan to send my wife and child away to different clandestine locations where neither I nor the malcontents could find them. I was terrified. I had to act before my wife gave birth, before the Provost could separate them. And so… I sought divine intervention.”
“You found our god? You spoke to Hakeem?”
Shannon nodded.
“But no one… you…” Nicodemus stammered. “How?”
A slight smile stole across the wizard’s lips. “It’s something of a legend among those that seek to break into literary strongholds. My research into textual intelligence gave me an advantage. I wrote a quaternary cognition spell that allowed me to think as the stronghold.”
“As the stronghold?”
The old man tapped his forehead. “Impossible, I know, but remember quaternary cognition allows one to think the unthinkable. I couldn’t explain it to you better without casting the spell on you. But regardless, the important part was that armed with this text, I snuck into the stronghold and fought its defensive language. For half a mile, I cut and slashed and edited to reach our god’s temple.”
Shannon’s smile grew. “Hakeem was reading at a desk when I reached him. He manifests himself as a thin, tawny-skinned man with silver hair and a long beard. It was the most mundane scene imaginable, and there I was stumbling into his temple, bristling with attack spells and soaked in my own blood. Without even looking up, Hakeem raises a hand and says, ‘A moment, my son, I’m near the end of a chapter.’”
Nicodemus’s eyes widened. “And then?”
“Then he finished the chapter, of course.” Shannon laughed. “And I threw myself at his feet and begged for mercy. I told him I would do anything for my family-I’d undertake any task, perform any labor; I’d die for them… and Hakeem did indeed have a task for me.”
The wizard’s smile fell into a grim line. “A malicious godspell from one of Hakeem’s enemies had penetrated his defenses and burrowed into his ark, the physical seat of his soul. All attempts to disspell this traplike curse had failed. So, because the trap could not be disarmed, it had to be sprung.”
“Hakeem made you take on the curse?”
“Made me? I embraced it. It was written to destroy a god, not a man. There was a chance it would do nothing at all to me; there was a chance it would kill me outright. I didn’t care. Without my wife or son, I couldn’t live.”
“And the curse was written in Language Prime? Is that how you know it exists?”
The old wizard grimaced. “The divine curse imbued knowledge into its victim’s mind and then tried to use that knowledge to harm the victim. Hakeem told me plainly that if I survived, he would use his godspell to remove all my memories of the text.”
Shannon narrowed his white eyes. “I remember walking into a small, dark room. I remember Hakeem’s ark-a tall crystal obelisk covered with moving runes. Then the world became a blur; I was moving at a tremendous speed but not moving at all. Two sentences appeared. Each one twisted around the other, like two snakes mating. The runes exploded and pain lanced through my eyes. Then, nothing. No image, no vision, only… blindness.”
Nicodemus held his breath.
Shannon sighed. “I woke in a caravan wagon headed for Besh-Lo. Hakeem had caused every Astrophell wizard to become terrified by the idea of harming my wife and son. He even compelled the merchants employed by the Order to give my wife a comfortable position in one of their trading houses. However, perhaps threatened by my infiltration of his temple, he did not extend such protection to me. He had allowed the provost to seize my research texts and exile me to Starhaven.”
Nicodemus paused for what he hoped was a sympathetic moment before pushing on. “But the divine curse, Magister, it taught you Language Prime?”
“It did, and Hakeem erased all my memories of it, except for the image of the two sentences. Until now, I’ve never told a single soul, living or textual, about that memory. I was always too afraid of what Hakeem might have to do to remove it.”
Nicodemus felt his heart begin to kick. “So it’s true then: Language Prime is real. Then there might be some connection between me and it. The monster must be after me because of that. Magister, don’t you see? I’m not supposed to be a cacographer.”
Shannon held up a hand. “Nicodemus, you’re jumping to conclusions. The creature said he needed you to replenish an emerald. He did not connect you to Language Prime. You must understand that no human could comprehend Language Prime.”
“But how do you know that?”
“Because,” Shannon said, “Language Prime has only four runes.”
A GUST OF wind swept across the bridge. It sent Nicodemus’s long black hair flying and blew Azure from Shannon’s shoulder. The poor bird had to flap hard just to stay over the bridge.
“Four runes!” Nicodemus said while struggling to tame his hair. “The language from which all other languages come has only four runes?”
Shannon held his arm up as a perch for Azure. “Strange but simple geometric runes. Two were hexagons with a few radial strokes; the other two were pentagons attached to similar hexagons.”
“But, Magister, that can’t be right.”
“It’s difficult to believe,” Shannon said as Azure landed on his arm. “The simplest common language possesses twenty-two runes. And the most complex, the shaman’s high language, has over sixty thousand runes.”
As the wind relented, Nicodemus tucked his hair into his robes. “But a language with only four runes could have only four single-rune words, sixteen two-rune words, sixty-four three-rune words, and so on.”
“Exactly,” Shannon said, helping Azure climb back onto his shoulder. “Primal words must be very long. Consider that a common language possesses a hundred thousand words, Numinous three times that. So, assuming Language Prime has a vocabulary of at least three hundred thousand, it would need words up to…” He paused to calculate. “Nine runes long to create all those words. But if it had twenty runes, it would need words only…” Another pause. “Only five runes long.”
Nicodemus closed his eyes and tried to figure out what calculations his teacher had used to discern that.
Shannon let out a long sigh. “And with only four runes, those long words would be nearly indistinguishable. Think of trying to memorize a thousand nine-digit numbers consisting of the numerals one through four. Impossible. And the sentences would be hundreds, maybe thousands of runes long. Utter gibberish.”
Nicodemus stopped calculating and laughed. “Imagine trying to spell in that language. Everyone would be a cacographer.”
Shannon started to say something and then paused. He frowned. His mouth opened, closed, opened again. “Nicodemus… that is a profound idea.”
“It is?”
A contrary breeze, this one blowing from Starhaven, flowed over the bridge. It brought with it the autumnal scents of moldy leaves and wood smoke.
Shannon was nodding. “What if cacography is simply a mismatch between a mind and a language? Our
