His eyes narrowed. “Francesca, what’s happening in the sanctuary? I need to know.”
“Hours ago, lycanthropes attacked a caravan coming in through the Northern Gate. The wounded were brought to the infirmary. A woman named Deirdre claimed she’d been struck by a lycanthrope spell and that only I could save her. By the time I got to her, she was nearly dead. An unknown text was compressing her lungs. I tried to disspell it, but it crushed her heart. She died on my table. A few moments later she came back to life.”
“What?”
“She came back to life. She’s an avatar, a creature possessing part of a deity’s soul.”
“A canonist?”
She shook her head.
“But if she’s not a canonist, how is she in Avel? Celeste would destroy any divinity not listed in the Celestial Canon. Perhaps she is serving Canonist Cala?”
“I’ve no clue.”
“Holy sky, Francesca, you must know something!” He said the word “something” with the same patronizing tone he had once reserved for their personal arguments.
“Oh wait, Cyrus, you’re right. I do know something. I was just too God-of-gods damned stupid to realize it until some patronizing man with an intelligence rivaled by garden tools told me I do,” she replied hotly, and then for good measure added, “you pretentious bastard.”
He only laughed. “Haven’t changed, have you? Still all fiery sarcasm or calm compassion with nothing between. And still speaking like an antique. I never heard anyone but you and my grandmother name the Creator as the God-of-gods.”
Francesca clenched her teeth. “Just shut it and listen.” 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