Nicodemus waited for Devin to finish drying her face. “Dev, the rumors.”
She examined his face. “Not now, Nico; it’s late.”
“I’m not going to forget.”
“No.” She sighed. “You won’t.”
The Gimhurst Tower stood at the southern edge of Starhaven’s inhabited quarters. Long ago, during the Lornish occupation, it had hosted the Lord Governor’s court. Now, save for the scriptorium at its top, the place was abandoned.
With Azure perched on his shoulder, Shannon stole down the tenth floor’s outer hallway. Through the parrot’s eyes, he regarded the pale moonbeams that slanted through the windows and splashed against the slate floors. The reflected glow lit the hallway’s opposite wall and its many sculpted panels. The low-relief carvings presented typical Lornish sensibility—bold and graceful figures without fine detail.
Slowly Shannon passed carved knights, serpents, and seraphs—these last wreathed with tattered gold leaf halos.
A half hour before, Azure had returned to his study after delivering his message to Nicodemus. She had seen nothing unusual on the rooftops. This had only increased Shannon’s anxiety for information and so prompted his current expedition.
To his left a space between two panels presented a short, wooden door. Shannon placed Azure on a windowsill opposite and instructed her to send a warning if anyone appeared. A rook’s croaking voice came from somewhere out in the night. He turned back to the door. Behind it lay Nora Finn’s “private library.”
Many academics, rightly distrustful of their peers, hid their most important manuscripts in well-defended secret archives. Maintaining such “private libraries” violated scores of academy bylaws, but the practice was so widespread that no dean or provost dared enforce any of those laws.
Fifty years ago, a newly arrived Shannon had suspected Nora of spying on him for his enemies in the North. He had been brash then, still accustomed to Astrophell’s infighting, and so had secretly pried into every aspect of Nora’s life. His search had disproved his suspicions and uncovered the location of this private library.
Slowly Shannon ran his finger down the door before him. Blindness prevented him from seeing the pine boards that felt so hard under his fingers.
This was just as well; the boards weren’t really there. They were subtexts—prose crafted to elude even the trained eye. Most spellwrights struggled to glean subtexts if only because they believed their eyes. When encountering a door’s texture or image, a human mind rarely accepted any conclusion other than that the door existed. Only with knowledge of the author’s purpose could a reader hope to see past a subtext’s semblance to its true meaning.
Shannon, however, was free of vision’s tyranny. He stared into the dark before him and considered how Nora would have written the subtext. First she would have chosen a primary language. Numinous was the obvious choice—it possessed the ability to create illusions by bending light. To the spell’s central passages, Nora must have added a few Magnus paragraphs to provide a physical barrier and give texture to the illusion.
After choosing her languages, Nora would have chosen particular sentence structures and diction to help her hide the spell.
Shannon ruminated on Nora’s prose style. As he did so, he saw faint golden runes float downward in ordered columns. Now he deduced what must be written between the lines. The faint sentences brightened. Slowly the text’s central argument revealed itself, and Shannon gazed upon a door-shaped waterfall of golden prose interlaced with silver sentences.
Out of habit, he undid the silver and gold buttons that ran down his sleeves. His eyes could now see through cloth, but it still felt more natural to spellwrite with arms bare.
Once ready, he wrote a short disspell in his right forearm and slipped it into his hand. This disspell, though composed of powerful Numinous runes, was thin and delicate. Lesser authors would have crafted their most powerful disspell and hacked through the door-subtext like a peasant chopping a tree trunk. Such a crude style would have produced a mangled subtext.
Shannon had spent too many decades sharpening his prose to leave behind such obvious evidence.
With the disspell complete, Shannon drew the text from his palm so it could fold into its proper conformation. This done, he wrote a brief handle onto the blade.
Then, holding the disspell as if it were a paintbrush, he leaned forward and chivvied its cutting edge between two of the door’s sentences. With slow, patient pressure he teased apart the subtext’s outer sentences to reveal its knotted central passage. Two quick strokes split one of its paragraphs.
With a high grinding whine, the door’s golden sentences began to churn as they detected the intrusion and sought to clamp down on Shannon’s hand.
But with calm determination, he edited two new Numinous sentences into the split paragraph. The grinding sound died and the subtext quieted.
With steady pinching motions, he darned the central passage. As his hand slowly withdrew, the glassy sentences flowed back into their original conformation.
A smile curled Shannon’s lips. The arch-chancellor himself wouldn’t know the subtext had been edited. The door clicked softly as it unlocked and swung open. Behind it stood a small space filled with the multichromatic gleam of a magical library.
Shannon cast a quick spell to Azure asking if she had seen anything. The parrot answered negatively and complained of the late hour. Smiling at her snappishness, Shannon left her on the windowsill to keep lookout and then stepped into Nora’s private library. He would not need mundane vision in such a textual environment.
It was a small space: five feet wide, ten deep. Though Shannon could not see the bookshelves that lined the walls, he recognized many of the texts they held. Nora had been studying textual exchanges between Starhaven’s gargoyles—a subject that provided insight into how magical constructs learned and thought. Shannon’s research also focused on textual intelligence; as a result, he possessed many of the same books that Nora had in her private library.
One unfamiliar codex attracted his eye. It lay alone at the back of the room, apparently on a low shelf or chest. Carefully he stepped to the library’s end and retrieved the manuscript. It was Nora’s personal research journal.
He flipped through the first few pages. Here lay a detailed study of how gargoyles selected information to share with each other. If he could take this book to his study for just one hour, his own research would leap forward. He had made any number of offhand remarks to other wizards about how much he should like to peruse Nora’s notes.
Virtue briefly fought ambition in his heart. “I’ll regret this tomorrow,” he grumbled as morality forced him to continue to flip through the book rather than take it away. Toward its end, he found a personal journal with dated entries.
The majority were complaints about librarians, apprentices, colleagues. Twice he scowled at disparaging remarks about “that blustering Shannon.”
It wasn’t until he reached a date eleven years past that an entry lifted his eyebrows: “Missive from Spirish noble. Wanted ‘to see his sleeping boy.’ His father? Boy new to D.Tower. Payment in gold sovereigns.”
The next winter, Nora had written, “Spirish master to see sleeping boy in D.Tower.” Two days later, “Spirish payment.”
“Los’s fiery blood! Nora was in a noble’s purse?” Shannon whispered. The bribing of wizards was rampant in Astrophell and Starfall Keep. But Starhaven, as the only academy removed from the human kingdoms, had known little of such corruption.
Shannon wondered if he’d become soft. Despite competing academically with Nora, he had stopped