interlacing arches, these brightly tiled fountains. We’d have to ride clear up to Dar for a better example of royal Spirish architecture. And yet at the center of all these minarets are aspens. Aspens! There should be palm fronds swaying in a sea breeze, not gold leaves quaking in thin mountain air.”
Kale smiled. “It is odd to think of the royal Spirish colonizing this place. They must have been miserable when it snowed.”
Amadi nodded. “Three kingdoms tried to remake this chunk of Chthonic rock in their image. All failed, and now we wizards play in the ruins.”
Kale chuckled. But before he could say what he found funny, the sound of running feet filled the courtyard.
Amadi turned around to see a young Starhaven acolyte skid to a halt. “Magistra Okeke, you’re to come to Engineer’s library immediately!”
Amadi frowned. “On whose command?”
The boy shook his head. “Don’t know her name, Magistra. A grand wizard, she wears a white badge and three stripes on her sleeves.”
Amadi swore. Only a deputy provost could wear such marks. “Take us there quickly,” she said.
The boy turned and ran. Amadi hiked up her robes and followed.
They pursued the young page through a blur of hallways to an archway large enough to admit seven horses running abreast.
Beyond sat an extraordinarily wide library. Long ago Starhaven engineers had filled the place with a row of limestone bridges that spanned the width of the room.
Along each arch stretched wooden facades decorated in the ornate Spirish style and converted into bookshelves. A labyrinth of traditional bookshelves flowed beneath the bridges like a river’s convoluted currents.
The place was alive with yelling librarians. Teams of black-robes rushed across bridges and among the bookshelves. A sudden, golden jet of Numinous prose exploded from one bridge and was quickly followed by a chorus of shouts.
“Mother ocean!” Kale issued the Ixonian curse. “What’s happening?”
Suddenly a nearby bookshelf burst into a molten ball of silvery Magnus. Amadi had just enough time to turn away and cover her face before a shockwave of fragmented prose and manuscripts struck.
When Amadi looked back, she saw a pile of rubble where the shelf had stood. “Firey blood of Los!” she swore. Amid the detritus now wriggled four pale-skinned constructs that took the shape of giant worms or grubs.
Each was roughly a foot long, possessing huge eyes and a segmented body. Just below each spell’s bulbous head sprouted three pairs of legs that ended in childlike human hands. More distressing were the bulging hind portions; in those segments speckled bits of half-digested text shone through their translucent carapaces.
“Disspell them before they reach a shelf!” Amadi barked and drew her arm back. Within moments she had filled her fist with a lacerate disspell.
Already the nightmare constructs were scurrying for nearby books. Their grasping, childlike hands moved them over the debris with alarming speed.
Beside her, Kale extemporized a spear made of common magical language. With an ululating war cry, he charged.
Amadi cast her disspell with her best overhand throw. The lacerate text-a whirling mass of Magnus shards-shot through the air to slice through a monster’s abdomen. The spell wailed as its carapace split open and disgorged its textual viscera.
Kale leaped over the deconstructing monster and gracefully thrust at the next worm. The thing jumped back to avoid the spear’s blade.
Kale, like many Ixoanians, was an excellent spearman. The instant his boots touched ground, he leaped and thrust again.
The worm retreated again but too slowly. Kale’s spearhead plunged into its abdomen. The thing shrieked and tried to pull away, but Kale had twisted his spear and caught the thing’s carapace with the spearhead’s barbs.
“Magistra,” he called, improvising a club of blunt passages. “By the bridge!” With a powerful club stroke, he split the construct’s head with a crack.
Amadi looked beyond the secretary and saw another construct scampering toward the bridge. By this time, she had composed another lacerate disspell. “Where’s the fourth?” she shouted. “Find it.”
As she had written it to do, her lacerate dispersed midair and bombarded the unfortunate monster with a storm of blades. The thing clicked and squealed as it began to writhe into deconstruction.
“I can’t find the fourth!” Kale called. “I can’t find it!” He was turning around frantically, looking for the fourth monster.
Amadi’s heart went cold. Not eight feet behind him, one of the monsters had reached a bookshelf. It reared up on its abdomen and used its childish hands to pull a heavy codex from the shelves.
“Behind you!” Amadi shouted.
As Kale spun around, the giant worm opened the book. Its head unraveled itself into a cloud of glowing golden prose.
Kale lunged. But even as his spear whistled through the air, the creature jammed its textual head into the book. Instantly, the thing’s body textualized and dove into the pages.
Kale’s spear swung through empty air as the codex fell to the floor and snapped shut.
“Damn it! Get back from the book!” Amadi ordered. Kale deftly jumped away. She ran in and covered the infected codex in a thick Magnus shield.
“Magister, what’s happened?” a frightened voice asked.
Amadi glanced up to see the boy who had led them to the library staring at Kale. She returned to swaddling the book with Magnus sheets.
“What were those things?” the boy asked.
Kale squatted down to look in the boy’s eyes. “Are you all right, lad? There’s no danger anymore, but we need to stand farther away.”
The boy nodded as Kale pulled him back. “What were they?”
“Bookworms,” Kale explained gravely. “Malicious language that invades manuscripts. They eat all the prose in a text and use it to make copies of themselves. When there are too many bookworms in a codex, it explodes. They use the explosion to spread themselves to other books.”
“And one of them got into that book?” the boy asked.
“That’s why Magistra is casting a containing spell around it. That will protect us if it bursts.”
Amadi had never encased an infected codex before, and so she was relieved when she glanced up and saw a small train of librarians rushing toward her. At their head strode an ancient grand wizard in a deputy provost’s robe.
“Sentinel Amadi Okeke of Astrophell, I presume?” the deputy provost boomed. She was a short, fat woman. A thin halo of white hair wreathed her wrinkled face. Her hood was lined with orange cloth signifying that she was a librarian. Given her rank, she was undoubtedly Starhaven’s Dean of Libraries.
“Yes, Magistra,” Amadi blurted, silently cursing herself for not learning this woman’s name.
The dean wasted no time. “What is this situation?”
“A violent deconstruction produced four class-four bookworm constructs,” Amadi reported. “Three curses were deconstructed but the last infected this codex.”
The ancient dean nodded to a librarian behind her. “Hand that to Magister Luro here. He’ll lift the curse or destroy the book.”
Amadi handed the infected codex to the young grand wizard who stepped forward.
The deputy provost studied her for a moment. “Magistra, we are facing a bookworm infection unlike any I have known. Starhaven’s protective language is among the most robust in the world, and yet these curses have spread to four libraries. They are rapidly destroying invaluable manuscripts.”
The ancient woman shook her head. “They’ve tertiary cognition and their executive language confounds all but our most direct methods of deconstruction. Whoever wrote them has an astounding understanding of textual intelligence.”
“Textual intelligence?” Amadi repeated. That was Shannon’s specialty.
“Indeed,” the dean continued. “I must have all available sentinels under my command until this infection is
