Nicodemus reread the passage to make sure he had not misunderstood. The text was the same, but this time something about the words bothered him. He read again.
There was something strange about the words “ancent,” “langeuge,” and “conscious.” He studied each one, trying to decide what it was that caught his eye.
A horrible idea filled his mind.
“No!” he whispered, a wild fear tearing loose in his gut. “No! I didn’t!” He staggered closer so that there could be no mistake. “Gods of grace, no!”
But there it was.
Los himself could not have inspired a more excruciating fear than that which now possessed him. He knew there should be an “i” somewhere in the word “ancent.” And “langeuge” should end in “-age.” As for “conscious,” only a fool would fail to put a “huss” after the “s”-conshuss. Or maybe it was “cawnshuss,” but definitely not “conscious”-that was absurd.
There was only one explanation: contact with his cacographic mind had filled the Index with misspellings.
It didn’t matter, Nicodemus told himself, pressing a hand to his chest. He had intended to steal the artifact anyway.
But the fear building in his mind would not be ignored. Stealing an artifact was a serious crime, and wizards despised nothing more than the destruction of a magical artifact. If they discovered him now, they would permanently censor magical literacy from his mind. Worse, their hatred for him and for all cacographers would multiply a hundredfold. He would become the most infamous misspeller since James Berr had killed those wizards so long ago.
“Calm yourself,” Nicodemus said slowly. Perhaps only this document was misspelled. It was written nearly four hundred years ago. Maybe the spellings were different then.
Intending to find Magister Shannon’s most recent treatise on spell intelligence, Nicodemus reached out and turned a page. With deep trepidation, he read:
From Concatenation’s Effects on Secondary Cognition in Semi-Atonomous Nonsense & Antisense Numinous Disspells, by Agwu Shannon. Resent spell inteligence research has focused on the nessesity of imbuing an aspect of the caster’s consciousness…
As he read the last word, Nicodemus groaned and shut his eyes. How could this be? Maybe, he thought, maybe the magical texts hadn’t been affected. Maybe contact with his mind had only misspelled the mundane texts.
Nicodemus pressed his palm to the page and thought of a spell called “touch.” He chose touch because it possessed such a simple, straightforward rune sequence that he would be able to tell if the version contained within the Index was misspelled.
Just as a fisherman’s hook yanks an unsuspecting trout from the river, the Index plucked Nicodemus’s mind from the wetness within his skull and sent it sailing into a vast and airy space.
It took a moment for him to perceive his new surroundings. Here Nicodemus had no eyes, no body. There was no up, no down. Everything was darkness.
Nicodemus’s surprise turned to fear. The blackness became heavy and thick, like humid air. He struggled to free himself but could not. He wanted to scream but had no lungs; he wanted to run but had no legs.
At last he forced himself to relax. Slowly, his mind opened to the strange new world. Tiny glimmers moved all around him. They grew brighter and became glowing gems that hung as if suspended from invisible tree limbs.
His vision became sharper and suddenly it was as if he were floating in the night sky. The luminescent orbs had become stars of different shapes and colors. Some blazed with fierce emerald radiation; others glowed indigo or ivory so dimly that they disappeared when he looked directly at them.
At last he realized that this black firmament was the world within the Index. Now he became aware of his body, swaying somewhere far below on the floor. The realization brought on a wave of vertigo and twisted his face into a grimace.
Back inside the Index, stars of silver and gold appeared. Nicodemus’s perception of the book’s night sky was rapidly improving; within moments he could see for untold miles. The starry array stretched endlessly away.
Suddenly he realized what he was looking at. These were not stars, but spells. His vision confirmed it. He was staring through the Index at every text contained within Starhaven.
He must be thinking through the spells attached to the Index; he was having quaternary thoughts. It was a glorious, dreamlike feeling. But his elation faded as he remembered why he had entered the Index in the first place.
He needed to find the touch spell.
A white star flashed brighter and began to speed toward him like a comet. An instant later, the spell crashed into him with a soundless explosion.
Removing his hand from the Index made Nicodemus’s mind drop like a lightning bolt back into his head. He blinked. Returning to the bony confines of his skull was intensely uncomfortable. He shook his head and felt his ideas slosh around like seaweed.
“Oh… yuck!” he said.
Gradually his mind molded itself to his skull. And he found that he could think clearly again.
A new knowledge of the simple touch spell was now inside of him. The spell’s primary sequence burned before his eyes as clearly as if he had just written it out a thousand times. But some of the runes were out of order-he knew because touch was one of the few spells simple enough that he had memorized its proper spelling.
Now he was sure: contact with his mind had misspelled one of the Order’s most prized artifacts.
Nicodemus put his hands to his face. “No… no…” he whimpered. Shame and guilt throbbed behind his eyes. He would forever be known as the cacographer who had destroyed Starhaven’s most valuable artifact.
“Wait!” he sputtered. “Wait.” There was one last hope. Perhaps if he could repair his disabled mind, he could repair the Index. “Show me,” he ordered the Index, “any mundane documents relating to curing cacography.”
As the book began flipping pages, Nicodemus looked up and muttered a prayer to Hakeem. When the Index stopped, he took a deep breath and looked down, ready to read.
But the page was blank.
BREATH SPILLED OUT of Nicodemus. His cacography had destroyed the Index. Maybe he’d vomit again.
“I had better be the Halcyon,” he mumbled to himself while pressing a hand to his belly. If he wasn’t, he’d never forgive himself for destroying such a beautiful artifact.
His hands began to tremble.
“Los damn it!” he growled. “I will not be like this.” He closed his eyes. “I won’t be weak. I won’t be crippled.”
He had to regain his determination to defeat the golem and erase his cacography. He could do it, if he was bold enough, disciplined enough. There was no time for fear or guilt.
He glared at the Index and cleared his mind of everything but the three asterisks of Shannon’s research journal. Then he placed his palm on the blank page before him.
His mind shot upward like an arrow into another plane. But rather than a starry night sky, he floated before a massive golden wall that stretched out almost endlessly in either direction. The wall itself was made of Shannon’s Numinous prose.
Nicodemus found himself staring at the journal’s first page, dated more than twenty years ago.
Simply by thinking of a later entry, Nicodemus sent the wall sliding to his left. Looking at the wall’s distant end, he saw that the text bent back to form a massive circle.
The codex-as-ring spun past in a golden blur. Then, without warning, it slammed to a dizzying, soundless stop.
Shannon’s last entry glowed before him. It was a long Numinous spell annotated by common language sentences that glowed green.
Nicodemus frowned, trying to glean the text’s purpose. The prose seemed to be that of a disspell, but it was not of the typical nonsense or antisense varieties. Its structure was that of a clamp.
That made no sense. Normally disspells sought to pull apart another spell’s argument. This disspell looked as if it would try to hold the other text together.
Nicodemus turned to the annotations. As he read, a smile spread across his face. “Magister,” he whispered. “It’s brilliant!”
