man. “No, wait. I have an idea.” She nodded. “It’s perfect. We might still fool the demon. The Walker has consumed other artifacts in the past. Francesca, do you have that anklet—the one I took off of you?”
“Yes,” Francesca said firmly, even though she felt tremulous. “It’s in my belt purse.” Her hands were shaking.
“Quickly, come here. We need to put that anklet into this poor bastard.”
“I … d-don’t understand,” Francesca stammered as she got to her feet.
“The Walker has been known to steal and consume powerful objects; we’ll use that to weaken him. Come here. The anklet needs to be in this man’s body. It can’t be around his ankle or in his hands or clothes. It needs to be inside of him so the Savanna Walker won’t notice until it’s too late. Can you cut him open? Put the chain in his stomach and then sew him up?”
Francesca now had the anklet in her hand. She shook her head. “It’d be simpler to textually pass it down his throat into his stomach.”
“Do it,” Deirdre said. “Quickly.”
Francesca wrote several silvery paragraphs in her biceps and then connected them into a long, thin, flexible tube of prose. Then she wrote a paragraph at its tip to hold the anklet.
“Roll the patient onto his side,” Francesca ordered. “Pull his head back and his jaw down.” Deirdre obeyed.
Francesca knelt beside the stunned man. Now in the safety of practiced actions, she was focused and calm. With a few deft motions, she inserted the spell into the man’s mouth and down his throat. By inspecting his neck from different angles, she could see her prose shine through his skin and ensure it didn’t enter his trachea and so his lungs. Expertly, she manipulated the spell through his esophagus, so that it snaked left and curled around inside his stomach. With a tight smile, she edited a sentence at the base of the spell; at the tip, a paragraph deconstructed and released the anklet into the stomach.
“It’s done,” she said and removed the spell from the poor man’s mouth. She checked to make sure he was still breathing and his pulse was strong. No sign of coughing or vomiting. “It went perfectly.”
A distant voice began to wail, and the calm Francesca had cultivated in action began to dissolve. A spray of orange dots spread across her vision. She had to sit down.
“Excellent,” Deirdre said and went back to one of the bundled kites. “Now we just need to get out of here.”
Francesca tried to focus on the other woman.
“Are you all right?” Deirdre asked without looking up.
“Oh, I’m cheery as the kitten who ate the cream,” Francesca said as casually as she could, “but my eyes won’t … won’t …” She couldn’t think of the word that started with f and meant “concentrate” or “direct” or “converge.”
Deirdre swore and grabbed Francesca’s hand and made her walk across the room. “Stay calm. You’re aphasic. The Walker is closer. Here, we need to get this harness on you.” She draped something around Francesca’s shoulders and waist. Francesca couldn’t see well enough to tell what it was, but it smelled of leather.
The floor shook again, and then the room filled with nonsensical shouting. Another voice was echoing up the minaret.
Francesca tried again to look at Deirdre, but the woman appeared little more than a dark blur. The orange flashes were getting worse. “What do you know about the magic of lofting kites? The kites change shape, yes? They take whatever shape is needed to fly?” Deirdre asked while seeming to strap into a harness of her own.
Francesca shook her head. “I just know there’s a … a … sail or chute written with hiero … hierophantic language, which can move air. A chute covered with wind spells … called a jumpchute. It blows out air and pulls the—” She screamed.
Something was bubbling up out of the minaret’s shaft. When she tried to look at it … she couldn’t. It was as if she went blind as she looked at the tendrils of twisting nothingness. She stumbled backward.
Deirdre’s hands gripped her shoulders. “Francesca! You need to stop screaming.”
The tendrils of nothing swirled around their legs. “Blindness! In the air … blind air,” Francesca stammered while she struggled to get free, but Deirdre’s arms felt as strong as iron.
“Only an illusion!” the other woman said. “It’s your reaction to the beast’s proximity. He’s spellbound the part of your mind that sees.”
The vapor swirled up to cover their heads. The world melted into blindness.
“I think I found a jumpchute,” Deirdre said over the wailing. “Could this be it?”
Something rough and round pushed into Francesca’s hands. “It’s cloth. Hierophants store … their language … only on cloth.”
“How do I cast the spell?”
Francesca shook her head. “Need a hierophant … to move sentences within cloth … and cast the spell in—”
Without warning, the wailing woman’s voice echoed loudly around Francesca.
“Damn!” Deirdre swore. “Wait.” Boot heels clicked on stone. Something was being dragged. Then came a clanging. It was loud at first but then quieted. The wailing stopped. A muffled bang. Then a stranger cacophony: two voices yelling.
Deirdre’s hands returned to Francesca’s shoulders. “I think I woke him up from your stunning spell.”
“Woke … who up?”
“The man we put the anklet into. I dropped him on the devotees climbing up. He didn’t fall straight down, more tumbled. It knocked them down to the bottom of the minarets, maybe broke a few bones, but they won’t stop until they’re dead or we are.” She paused. “Listen.”
The wailing was growing louder.
“So what do we do?” Francesca blurted.
“Escape with the kite. There’s a cloth ribbon around the jumpchute. It has the wind marshal’s emblem on it. What happens if I tear it?”
“Don’t you bloody dare!” she cried. “Tearing a magical manu … manu … page sets its sentences free. You don’t know—”
“But it might activate the jumpchute?”
Panicked and blind, Francesca reached out and tried to grab the other woman to punctuate her next point. “It might blow both of us into—”
Three more echoing voices joined the other.
“We don’t have time!” Deirdre shouted. “There are too many of them down there.”
“Damn it, even if there’s a whole bloody legion down there, you’d be mad to—” Francesca started to yell.
But then she heard the loud whisper of tearing cloth.
Chapter Five
Shannon ran to the window and thrust his hand into a sunbeam. The light illuminated his tawny skin, his knobby fingers, and the wooden floorboards below them.
His flesh was slightly transparent.
He grabbed his left pinky and pulled. The digit shone golden. With a firm tug, he unraveled the finger into a cylindrical cloud of swirling prose.
He wasn’t Shannon, not technically; he was a text.
He released the golden words, and they snapped back into his transparent pinky. He felt his face and found a short beard and mustache, a hooked nose and a cascade of white dreadlocks.
He was a spell written to look like Shannon, to believe he was Shannon. He pressed a hand to his chest. He didn’t need to breathe, but his lungs were heaving.