Spellbreaker: Book 3 of the Spellwright Trilogy. Blake Charlton
speak like one who has received a prophecy.”
“Through the godspell I bought from the smuggler.”
“I don’t mean to doubt you, but is it a … strong prophecy?”
“I inherited my mother’s ability to comprehend the possibilities of the future. I do not have her gift for seeing the landscape of time, but I am a good enough judge. I foresaw that I cannot escape the choice between killing someone I love sometime early tomorrow morning or dying myself. Hence, goddess, my challenge to you.”
Dhrun nodded. “Then … I suppose you might dispose of me if my death would advance our cause significantly—say by eviscerating me to make one of those godspells you are buying from the smuggler.”
“Well played,” Leandra said softly. “Here I thought I was interrogating you. You know, for a young divinity, you are impressively shrewd.”
“Oh the boys are young, but Nika—like most everything in the Cloud Culture—has been around forever. I was first incarnated when the Cloud People were still a seafaring tribe on the western Spirish coast. I have some hazy memories of the Spirish tribes destroying our cities and exiling us to the sea. There were decades of wandering before we fought the outer islands away from the Lotus People.”
“Maybe you should stop playing with the boys so much and write some of it down, for posterity.”
“There’s no glory in posterity. Victory begets posterity, not the other way around. But to answer your question, my lady, if you were to kill me tomorrow, it would be to deconstruct me and sell some part of my text to that smuggler we just met.”
Leandra met the goddess’s eyes. “You know I am dealing with the smuggler to discover how to stop his kind.”
“My lady, I am two thirds a wrestler,” Dhrun said. As she spoke the arm interlaced with Leandra’s became thicker, hairier.
When Leandra looked up at Dhrun’s face, the divinity had manifested Dhrunarman: dark eyes, strong jaw covered by a scrim of a youthful beard. Dhrun’s voice, so suddenly male, was low. “Learning an illegal hold helps one escape it, but it also increases the temptation to use it.”
“Dhru, do you think me that ruthless?”
He looked at her with a young man’s face but through the eyes of an ancient soul. “Most divinity complexes I’ve encountered are a fixed mixture of the beings that fused to create them. There are very few who, like me, can shift within the bounds of our incarnations. Would you agree?”
Leandra said that she would.
“When you can change so fast—from male to female, from young to old—you can see how fast everyone else changes but doesn’t realize it simply because the color of their hair or skin or what’s between their legs is constant. It seems to me that every soul—human or divine—is far more flexible than it ever supposes.”
Leandra paused to think about this and looked aft. She was supposed to be watching for whatever Holokai might have seen flying between the Standing Islands. Seeing nothing but moonlit limestone, she turned back to divinity complex.
“So, you think that under the right circumstances—perhaps if deconstructing you would benefit our cause—I could become that ruthless?”
Dhrun took both of her shoulders in his upper hands and looked into her eyes. “I know what our cause means to you. I know how much you have suffered.” He paused. “And, given how much I believe in our cause, part of me hopes that, if it would mean victory, you would be that cold and calculating. So if I may, I’ll turn the question around: Do you think you could be that ruthless?”
Leandra made her expression as blank as her heart felt.
Slowly, he nodded. “I thought so.”
There was only one problem with Nicodemus’s metaspell: Wherever he cast it, prayers were answered.
Literally.
In league kingdoms, five thousand or so humans praying about a specific need incarnated a deity dedicated to that need’s resolution. The goals that helped answer those prayers became a deity’s “requisites.” Satisfying such requisites caused prayerful text to be cast from ark stones to deities, bestowing power and pleasure.
As a result, Nicodemus’s metaspells created disciplined armies led by war goddesses, artisans trained by sly deities of skill, crops protected by jovial—if not always sober—harvest gods, and so on. The “divine mob” or “god mob,” as they were called when tongues were in cheeks, had made the league as powerful as the empire. The problem was that some human prayers, and therefore some gods of the mob, were malignant. The problem was the proliferation of neodemons.
And it was one hell of a problem.
Neodemons were far weaker than the true demons of the Ancient Continent, but they could nonetheless manifest all the malicious potentials of the human heart. And thirty years of hunting neodemons had lead Nicodemus to believe that such potentials were nearly infinite in variety and ingenuity.
Nicodemus opened the doorflap and stood amid a dark camp—round tents, a cooking fire gone to ash and embers. On three sides, nightblack jungle climbed up to starry groves of sky. Just beyond the camp, a sandy riverbank formed a cove where five river barges had been moored. A gap stood between the first and the third boat like a missing tooth.
Roughly sixty yards out on the mile-wide river floated the stolen barge. Three stranger vessels—a riverboat and two canoes—were lashed to the barge. Several figures moved between them: humans, or at least humanoids, probably piratical devotees of the River Thief.
Nicodemus groaned. After arriving in Chandralu twenty days ago, he had learned that Leandra had failed for a year to dispatch two neodemons—one a monkey goddess of brigands, attacking caravans south and east of the city; the other, a water god known as the River Thief, was stealing cargo from the Matrunda River merchants between Chandralu and the ancient Lotus capital of Matrupor.
None of the merchants had realized they were the River Thief’s victims until they docked in Chandralu and discovered their merchandise had been replaced with river stones. The merchants had tried setting guards, changing routes, employing mercenary divinities, but nothing deterred the River Thief. More disconcerting, Leandra had twice led investigations to Matrupor without uncovering a clue as to how the pirate god achieved such spectacular larceny.
Hearing this, Nicodemus had suspected one of Leandra’s officers was corrupt and informing the River Thief. So Nicodemus had told both Leandra and the Sacred Regent of Ixos he would hunt the monkey neodemon when, in fact, he had secretly led several barges filled with Lornish steel up river to Matrupor, hoping that the River Thief would mistake him for a merchant and strike.
But the journey had been uneventful. Under the guidance of Magistra Doria Kokalas, his envoy from the hydromancers, Nicodemus had sold his cargo in the ancient Lotus capital for a modest profit and filled his barges with rice, silk, jade. Wondering if the black market would attract the River Thief’s attention, Nicodemus had hidden contraband opium in each of his barges.
Four days ago the party had embarked from Matrupor, hopeful of being burgled. But last night Nicodemus had fallen asleep with expectations of failure; they were only a day’s journey from the Bay of Standing Islands. And yet here he was, swatting mosquitoes and watching one of his barges being looted.
He studied the river currents and the lapping shoreline waves. The water seemed mundane, but on the sandy bank two of his watchmen lay unmoving. No simple achievement considering that both were master spellwrights. Whatever kind of neodemon the River Thief turned out to be, he clearly was what Nicodemus considered a “subtle” deity.
An ominous sign.
Most young neodemons were blunt minded: fire-breathing