Spellbound: Book 2 of the Spellwright Trilogy. Blake Charlton

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СКАЧАТЬ She explained how she had carried Deirdre to the roof while others lost their ability to speak and began to wail.

      She did not mention Typhon or Deirdre’s belief that the demon had brought Cyrus back to the city as a “screen.” However, she repeated Deirdre’s claim that the Savanna Walker was the cause of the aphasia.

      Cyrus looked at her. “The Savanna Walker’s a child’s tale.”

      “The aphasia curse was real enough.” As she said this, Francesca thought of the text that had spellbound Deirdre’s heart. Suddenly, she knew how to prevent Cyrus’s sense of duty from endangering them both. He wouldn’t like it … if he ever found out about it. She looked at him. “I’m worried a curse might have gotten into you.”

      Cyrus looked at her. “An aphasia curse or the one that crushed the avatar’s heart?”

      “Either.”

      Cyrus looked at her. “If I become ill or aphasic, we’ll fall out of the sky.”

      “I can cast a countercurse to see if you have any foreign text in your body.”

      “What about the text I’m writing in my heart?”

      “I edit the countercurse so it won’t interfere.”

      He nodded.

      “Give me your arm.”

      When Cyrus obeyed, she took his wrist with her left hand. With her right, she cast a needlelike Magnus sentence and jabbed it into one of his arm veins.

      Using her hand muscles, Francesca wrote a compact medical text in Magnus and Numinous. It took a few moments. When it was ready, she used the Magnus needle to cast it into Cyrus’s bloodstream. He wasn’t fluent in the wizardly languages, so the spell was invisible to him. But Francesca watched the silver-gold spark tumble up his arm and into his shoulder.

      “Hold still,” she commanded and watched the spell flow into the center of Cyrus’s chest and then shoot to the area under his right pectoral muscle. The text had passed through the right chambers of his heart and been pumped into his lung.

      “Do you see a curse?” he asked.

      “I said hold still!”

      She watched the spell tumble though the lung’s fine capillaries. Then it made sudden, halting progress back to the center of his chest. She tensed. When it reached the left side of his heart, she cast a backhand wave of Numinous signal spells into his chest. One of these struck the spell in his heart and commanded it to unfold.

      She nodded with satisfaction as her text unobtrusively explored the beating left ventricle of his heart.

      Using her thigh muscles, Francesca forged several wide sheets of Numinous signal spells. By flexing her leg, she mashed the sheet into an unstable ball. Every few moments, part of the sheet decayed and sent single texts flying in random directions.

      She flexed and extended her legs five times more until the decaying ball radiated a shower of signal texts in all directions. Every few moments, one struck the text in Cyrus’s heart, commanding it not to take action.

      They were now flying above the highest foothills. Here the narrows ran between steep gorges. The dark Auburn Mountains stood before them.

      “Burning heaven, Fran, do you see something in me?” Cyrus asked.

      “I don’t see a curse. But I placed a spell in you so I can monitor you.”

      “You think I might become aphasic later?”

      “In all likelihood you’re fine, but I want to be safe. Just stay close to me for a while … for my sake.” She squeezed his arm.

      He stared at her and then turned back to the jumpchute.

      She studied the spell in his young, healthy heart. As often happened when she examined a body, she felt as if she could look forward into time and see the different, older men he might become—some hale and athletic as he was now, some soft with inaction, some wasting away from disease.

      Suddenly, Cyrus broke her reverie: “You know something you’re not telling me.”

      “I do, but it’s not about your health,” she said, knowing that she was, in at least two senses, lying.

      Chapter Eleven

      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 СКАЧАТЬ