When they continued their trek, Shannon showed him how to write several common language sentences around the Index so that it would float in a slow circle around the younger man’s waist.
“When wizards must fight,” the old linguist said gravely, “we float our spellbooks like this.”
A moment later, Deirdre returned with auspicious news: there was no sign of wizards in Gray’s Crossing. She had learned from a town watchman that shortly after sundown all the black-robes had run up to Starhaven.
After another quarter hour walking, the town came into view around a bend. It was not much to look at: a huddle of round Lornish cottages clustered around two inns, a smithy, a fuller, and a small common. At the hamlet’s center sat the intersection of the Westernmost Road and the smaller road that ran up to Starhaven. Most of the inhabitants were farmers or shopkeepers who sold to the wizards.
With Deirdre leading the way, the party hurried off the road and into the trees. Cautiously, they picked their way so as to emerge behind the stables of a dilapidated inn named the Wild Crabtree.
Deirdre hustled them into the back of the building and up a flight of rickety stairs. Shannon wrote a flamefly spell and scattered the incandescent paragraphs around the party so as to light the way.
“The inn’s owner is a Highlander,” Deirdre whispered. “He rents the top floor to Dralish smugglers who buy weapons in Spires and run them down to the Highland rebels. There’s a secret compartment in the floor where they hide the blades.”
She stopped before a door. “Be quiet now; I have to let the other devotees of Boann know we are friends.” She knocked twice and then froze.
Her hand had pushed the door open slightly. Inside it was dark and silent.
“Careful,” Shannon whispered, a spherical Magnus spell appearing in his hand.
Deirdre drew the greatsword from her back and then pushed the door wide to let the light from Shannon ’s flamefly spell fall into the dark room.
Peering past her shoulder, Nicodemus saw-sprawled across the floor-a motionless body.
THERE WERE EIGHT dead men, three women. Not a drop of blood on any of them.
Shannon found a slowly deconstructing Numinous paragraph lodged behind the ear of one victim. “Fellwroth,” he said, inspecting the text. “Attacked maybe twenty hours ago.”
The three connected rooms were spacious and sparsely furnished. Nicodemus walked into the farthest room and noticed a bowl of stew sitting on a table. “The monster took them by surprise,” he noted, looking at the fat congealing at the bowl’s edge. “No sign of struggle.”
John went to each of the bodies and closed their staring eyes.
Meanwhile Nicodemus studied the ceiling. With his new knowledge of the original languages, he could see the cyan auras of rats as they scurried among the rafters.
Deirdre stood unmoving by the door. Her lips pressed white against each other. “It makes no sense,” she said. “There’s no way Fellwroth could have known the ark was here.”
“Deirdre,” Shannon said from across the room, “I am sorry for your loss. I don’t know if you knew these souls well, but-”
“Boann’s ark is missing,” she interjected. “I must get it back!”
The grand wizard looked at her. “What does the ark look like? Could it have been hidden?”
“It is a standing stone, six feet tall, two wide, two deep. The edges are smooth. It is a water ark-most of the year it rests in one of the Highland rivers sacred to Boann. Three parallel lines flow down from its top; they symbolize her rivers.”
Nicodemus looked at Deirdre. Something about the ark’s description stirred his memory.
Deirdre began pacing around the room and looking down at the wooden floor. “There is a chance it was hidden. The tavern’s owner built a secret compartment in the floor. The other devotees may have concealed the ark in it.”
She bent down and knocked on the wooden planks. “We have to be quiet. But we can find the compartment by listening for an echoing knock. One of the druids told me so.”
Again something pulled at Nicodemus’s memory. His hands were wringing each other. He glared at the tattooed things and willed them to stop.
Both John and Shannon had joined Deirdre in rapping softly on the floor. “If we can’t find the ark,” Shannon said, “then we have no choice but to flee for Starfall Keep.”
“I won’t leave my goddess behind,” Deirdre insisted.
Shannon shook his head. “But if Fellwroth has stolen the ark, it could be anywhere.”
The avatar continued to knock on the floor. “Then I will make Fellwroth tell me where it is.”
John was tapping the floor by the window.
Shannon grunted in annoyance. “Even if you captured a golem, the monster would simply disengage his spirit. And we haven’t a clue where Fellwroth’s true body might be.”
“Then I will find the true body,” Deirdre said while knocking again.
The old linguist grimaced. “Deirdre, we must get Nicodemus to safety.”
“We go nowhere, Magister,” Nicodemus said coldly, “unless it’s to recover the emerald or disspell your curse.”
Shannon folded his arms. “It’s not enough that I must die? You two want to join me?”
Before Nicodemus could respond, one of John’s knocks produced a hollow echo.
“Sweet heaven!” Nicodemus swore, taking a step backward. His cold focus was shattered. Now his frightened mind teemed with memories of his dreams: the dying nightmare turtles, the pale ivy, the body shrouded in white. He remembered walking on the Spindle Bridge with Shannon, their boot heels clacking unusually loudly on the bridge stone.
“Sweet heaven,” he swore again and grabbed the Index from the sentences that had been floating it around his waist. He sat heavily in an empty chair.
The others went to John and helped him hoist up a trap door.
“It’s empty,” Nicodemus heard himself say as Deirdre, John, and Azure peered down into the secret compartment.
Deirdre stared at him. “How did you know?”
Memories flashed through Nicodemus’s mind so quickly they made him dizzy.
“We’ll need a distraction.” His words were quick and anxious. He was trying to speak as fast as he was thinking. “With the signal text from my keloid diffused, he’ll never realize we’re so near. We can slay his living body. But the distraction will have to make him use a golem and… when the living body is dead, I can use the emerald to disspell Magister’s canker. Or Boann might… but I’ll have the emerald.”
A wave of heat washed through his body. “I’ll have the emerald.” He stood and dropped the Index back into its floating orbit around his waist. “I’ll be complete!”
All three of them were staring at him now. “What under heaven are you talking about?” Shannon asked.
Nicodemus went to the far window and removed its paper screen. The room looked out on the forest. High above the skyline, cutting a black silhouette against the stars, stood Starhaven’s many towers.
“We can recover the emerald,” he said, “because I know where to find Fellwroth’s true, living body.”
NICODEMUS PURSED HIS lips. “I should have known when I was replenishing the ghosts’ book and saw through the young Chthonic’s eyes. I knew the Chthonic’s thoughts; I knew that the Chthonic people first emerged from the underworld up there.”
He nodded out the window toward Starhaven. “They came out of a cave high up on the rockface. I learned that the Chthonics protected themselves from the attacks of an older race they called the blueskins by filling the cave mouth with powerful metaspells. And the blueskins filled the cave mouth with tortoise-like constructs.”
“But we know this,” Deirdre said. “You saw in a later vision that the Chthonics had collapsed the cave.”
Nicodemus looked back at the avatar. “I saw that the cave was gone, but the Chthonic whose eyes I was seeing through never thought about the cave. His mind was preoccupied by the human army laying siege to Starhaven.”
“The cave wasn’t closed?” Shannon asked.
Nicodemus shook his head. “And Fellwroth’s true body lies in that cave. In a dream I saw ivy-representing the Chthonic metaspell-and the turtles-representing the blueskin constructs-attacking Fellwroth’s body. They must represent the ancient spells still resisting Fellwroth’s intrusion into the cave.”
