gargoyle’s tail was still attached to a large spellbook. But rather than unfasten it, she stepped on top of the codex and turned to present her back.
Nicodemus’s black apprentice robes had slits sewn into the top of the sleeves, near the shoulder. He slipped his arms out of these and looked down at his right elbow.
Magical runes were made not with pen and paper, but within muscle. Nicodemus, like all spellwrights, had been born with the ability to transform his physical strength into runes made of pure magical energy.
By tensing his bicep, he forged several runes within his arm. He could see the silvery language shine through skin and sinew. Tensing his bicep again, he joined the letters into a sentence, which he let spill into his forearm.
With a wrist flick, he cast the simple spell into the air, where it twisted like a tendril of glittering smoke. He extended his arm and cast the sentence onto the nape of the monkey’s neck.
The spell contained a disassemble command; therefore, where it touched the construct, she began to shine with a silver glow. Nicodemus wrote a second sentence with his left arm and cast it next to his first. A seam of light ran down to the gargoyle’s tail, and the two sides of her back swung open as if on hinges.
A coiling profusion of incandescent prose shone before him.
Different magical languages had different properties, and this gargoyle was made of two: Magnus, a robust silvery language that affected the physical world, and Numinous, an elegant golden language that altered light and other magical text. The gargoyle thought with her Numinous passages, moved with her Magnus.
Nicodemus’s task was to add more energetic Magnus sentences. Fortunately, the structure of these energetic sentences was so simple that even a cacographer could compose them without error.
Careful not to touch the gargoyle, Nicodemus began to forge runes in his biceps and cast them into the gargoyle. Soon the Magnus sentences appeared as a thick rope of silvery light that coursed from his arms into the construct.
Though Nicodemus was a horrible speller, he could write faster than many grand wizards. Therefore he decided to provide the gargoyle with extra energetic text now; she might not submit to another edit later.
After moving his hands closer, Nicodemus tensed every muscle in his arms, from the tiny lumbricals between his hand bones to the rounded deltoid atop his shoulder. Within moments, he produced a dazzling flood of spells that flowed into the gargoyle’s back.
The blaze grew so bright that he began to worry about bringing un-wanted attention to the library. He was standing yards away from the nearest window, but a wizard working late might walk past the Stacks and see the glow. If caught, he would be expelled, perhaps even censored permanently.
Just then a loud thud sounded to Nicodemus’s left. Terrified, he stopped writing and turned, expecting to find an enraged librarian bearing down on him.
But he saw only darkened bookshelves and scrollracks. Beyond those was a row of narrow, moonlit windows.
A second thud made Nicodemus jump. It sounded as if it were coming from the library’s roof.
He looked up but saw only ceiling. Then the darkness was filled by a repetitive clomping, as if someone were running. The footsteps passed directly over him and then sped away to the opposite side of the library.
Nicodemus turned to follow the sound with his eyes. When the footsteps reached the roof’s edge, they ceased. A moon-shadow flickered across two of the paper screens.
Then came a low muttering beside him: “Ba, ball, balloon, ballistic.” Something snickered. “Symbolic ballistics. Ha! Symbolic, diabolic. Diabolic, symbolic. Sym…bolic is the opposite of dia…bolic. Ha ha.”
Nicodemus looked down and, to his horror, saw his hand enmeshed in the silver and gold coils of the gargoyle’s text. His cacographic touch was causing the once stable sentences to misspell. He must have accidentally laid his hand on the construct when startled by the footsteps.
“Oh, hell!” he whispered, pulling his hand back.
When his fingers left the gargoyle, the two sides of her back snapped shut. Instantly, she was on her feet and staring at him with one eye that blazed golden and another that throbbed with silver light. “Vertex, vortex, university,” she muttered and laughed in a way that showed her sharp primate teeth. “Invert, extravert. Ha ha! Aversion, aveeeeersion.”
“Ohhhhh hell,” a wide-eyed Nicodemus whispered, too shocked and frightened to move.
A sudden nauseating wave of guilt washed through him. He might have irreversibly damaged the gargoyle’s executive text.
Then the construct was off, dashing down the aisle. A spellbook was still hooked to her tail. Now, dragging behind her, the book opened and began to lose paragraphs written in several magical languages. Falling from the tortured pages, the paragraphs squirmed as if alive. Two exploded into small clouds of white runes; others slowly deconstructed into nothing.
“Wait!” Nicodemus yelled, sprinting after the misspelled gargoyle. “Gargoyle, stop!”
The construct either did not hear or did not care. She leaped up at a window and exploded through its paper screen.
Nicodemus reached the sill in time to watch her fall down ten stories into a dark courtyard filled with elm trees, grass, and ivy.
As the gargoyle dropped, stray paragraphs continued to fall from the spellbook attached to her tail. Radiant words of gold, green, silver, and white fluttered downward and in so doing formed a comet’s tail of radiant language.
“Please, heaven, please don’t let Magister Shannon find out about this,” Nicodemus prayed. “Please!”
The gargoyle hit the ground and scampered away, but the still-falling coruscation of paragraphs began to illuminate the stone spires, arches, and arcades of the surrounding buildings. Nicodemus turned to sprint after his mistake.
But as he did so, something caught his eye. What exactly, he couldn’t say. For when he looked back, it had disappeared, leaving only the vague impression that he had seen—standing atop an ornate stone buttress—a hooded figure cloaked entirely in white.
The creature, now crouching beside a stone chimney, watched the gargoyle scamper through the courtyard.
The construct’s speed implied excessive energetic language; its erratic course, a misspelled executive text. Only a powerful cacographer was likely to produce such a construct.
“Meaning my boy is in that library this very instant,” the creature muttered while glaring at the Stacks. He had glimpsed his quarry in the library window, but the rain of paragraphs loosed by the gargoyle had obscured everything but the boy’s silhouette.
Suddenly the night resounded with a sharp crack.
The creature turned and saw a silver spell shoot out from behind a stone spire. The spherical text was written in Magnus and so would have a powerful effect on the physical world. Indeed, its blazing sentences seemed designed to blast a human body into a cloud of bone fragments and vaporized blood.
More important, the spell was flying straight for the creature’s head.
He dove right, rolling down the slate roof. There was a crash and needles of pain flew down his back. No doubt the Magnus spell had shattered the chimney into stone splinters.
At the roof’s edge, the creature came out of its roll and crouched. A flying buttress to another building stood roughly ten feet away. He looked back but there was no sign of the guardian spell that must have cast the Magnus attack.
His body was not in danger; guardian spells were slow on rooftops. But they were lightning quick in courtyards and hallways and so could prevent him from retrieving the boy.