carried the crimson language to Leandra and stood behind her.
As Leandra removed her headdress, she was aware of Dhrun’s lower hands resting on her shoulder and his upper hands moving near her ears. She caught glimpses of the godspell’s red glow, but she felt nothing press against her forehead or scalp. “Is the godspell around—” she started to ask, but then she perceived … what was it?
It was like nothing earthly.
Currents of emotion moved all around her but not through her. She felt them only partially, as if she were watching a poignant shadow play or listening to a touching song. But these sympathetic feelings were sparked not from actors or lyrics, but from the multiplicity of her future selves. There were thousands of her possible selves. Hundreds of thousands? No one could say how many.
Most of herselves felt variations on her present anxieties, but a few were filled with strange emotions changing too fast to identify. Concentrating on one of these improbable futures was like trying to barehandcatch an oiled gecko. And yet … Leandra couldn’t resist mentally chasing these bright futures.
Dhrun had walked back to the smuggler and was using his upper hands to pull rubicund sentences from the smuggler’s folio and tie them around the man’s head.
Leandra closed her eyes and concentrated on the alluring futures. Again they flitted away, but not before one gave her a glimpse into an hour hence in which she felt unabashed triumph. Leandra’s excitement grew. Perhaps she could learn the smuggler’s identity? Discover how he was eviscerating deities?
With even more vigor, Leandra mentally chased after this triumphant future. Within moments she lost it within a sea of banal hours.
Something more was needed.
Leandra peered through slit eyelids. Dhrun was adjusting the godspell tied around the smuggler’s head. Neither man was attending to her.
Because of her parentage, Leandra could give herself over to her disease and gain temporary fluency in the magical language she was touching. In this state, she could perfectly understand and misspell any magical text. For a price, she became the universal spellbreaker.
If she used this ability now, she could alter her new godspell; however, this would undoubtedly cause the divine aspects of her body, which she had inherited from her mother, to attack the human aspects she had inherited from her father. The result would be a disease flare, possibly with dire consequences. And yet if she could catch that triumphant future, the rewards might justify the risks.
A change ran through her futures; more and more of them were filled with shock. Some also felt triumph, others raw horror. A different future had become probable, and the more she thought about that future, the more probable it became.
Leandra brought a hand up to her forehead and let her disease consume her. Soon her joints would ache and a rash would unfurl across the bridge of her nose, her forehead, her cheeks. Perhaps this flare would be so bad that Leandra would need to urinate frequently and her hands and face would swell. The God-of-god’s willing, the flare would not be so bad as to cause her perception to expand. But now, in this painless moment, she forgot the risks as her mind joined with the godspell.
For an instant, she became the text’s progenitor—a minor but ancient Trillinonish goddess of artistry, beauty, dance. The impoverished priests of her temple had sold her ark stone to the smugglers for thirty lengths of gold. The smugglers had bound her in a textual cage and cracked open her skull to pull the living language out of her mind. Her shrieks deafened two men.
In the next instant, Leandra returned to her own skull. Her hands were shaking as she thought of what the smuggler’s people had done.
Neither the smuggler nor Dhrun had noticed any change in Leandra. No doubt this was because of a side effect of Leandra’s current condition. When her disease flared, Leandra caused those nearby to better understand any language with which she was working. Fortunately an increased awareness of the red language had made the two men more preoccupied with the text around the smuggler’s brow.
Leandra wanted to know more about how the godspell around her head had been created. The imperial spellwright who had edited it had shaped the text so that it would project a human mind forward by one hour, but in the flare of her disease Leandra was less human, more textual.
Carefully she misspelled one word in the godspell’s first sentence and so increased her perception twenty-four times farther into the future. No other mortal creature but she could have made this misspelling, not even her illustrious father.
Normally Leandra would have been proud of such an achievement, but now she felt nothing but overwhelmed by the newly perceptible future selves. If she had thought the next hour contained a multiplicity of futures, the next day produced a million times as many, a hundred million times as many.
She swayed, struggling to retain her sanity amid the prismatic spray of herselves. In the past her hybrid-mind had been prone to dangerous expansions of perception, but nothing so dangerous as this had ever happened before. Now only one thing saved her from madness. Only one thing allowed her to grab the table with both hands as if she were drunk.
A little less than a third of her future selves were wracked by a specific guilt. Though Leandra had never felt it before, she recognized the dreadful emotion as that belonging to someone who had recently killed a dear friend, a family member, or a lover.
Another third of her future selves were filled with the anxieties of someone fleeing danger and wracked with a devastating guilt about the sudden death of everyone she loved.
But the last third of her future selves felt nothing. Nothing at all. And they felt nothing, because they were all dead.
With her godspell-laced mind working so hotly in the future, Leandra deduced the implications of these emotions into her own, personal prophecy: In one day’s time, she had to choose between dying or murdering someone she loved. If she tried to run or avoid the prophecy, everyone she loved would perish.
Leandra misspelled her godspell again so that she could feel only an hour forward. The prism of herselves collapsed enough so that it no longer drove her toward insanity. Her breathing slowed. Her heart calmed. But now she needed to hurry back to Chandralu and solve the mystery of her future murder.
She shuddered as she remembered the emotions of the women she would become. She could not run or everyone she knew would suffer. No way around it. In one day’s time, she would have to murder someone she loved or die.
She looked up at Dhrun. He looked back at her with curious, beautifully dark eyes.
Leandra was left with one question.
Who?
Waking from a nightmare, Nicodemus blinked in confusion at himself. Or more accurately, at a copy of himself.
The copy, equally blurry-eyed, blinked back.
They were lying in a dark tent. Humid night. Outside, jungle insects whirred and a river lapped.
Nicodemus could not understand where he was or what he was seeing. The man before him was himself: long raven hair streaked with silver, dark olive skin, chest and arms illuminated with indigo tattoos, wearing a white lungi. But unlike Nicodemus, this man was limned by a wan silvery aura.
If an Ixonian deity chose to ignite their aura, it could not be manipulated or extinguished; a godspell prevented this. Not all deities chose to ignite their auras. But for those who did, an aura authenticated a claim of divinity—useful in an archipelago of gods and imposters. Because an aura shone in proportion to its divinity’s strength, the sputtering light around Nicodemus’s copy indicated that he was a god near deconstruction.
Nicodemus wondered if he was dreaming still. He remembered a nightmare of … what? A claustrophobic prison, blinding light. There had been a baby with a woman’s face, chains, water around his legs.