Страница 14 из 19
Sha
After choosing her languages, Nora would have chosen particular sentence structures and diction to help her hide the spell.
Sha
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.
Sha
With the disspell complete, Sha
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 Sha
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 Sha
Sha
It was a small space: five feet wide, ten deep. Though Sha
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 Sha
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?” Sha
Sha
He reread the journal entries. The “D.Tower” clearly was the Drum Tower. But why would someone pay to see a sleeping boy? It seemed that Nora had supposed the man to be his father.
Sha
A sudden chill ran through his veins. Nicodemus was the only one.
Worse, that was the year the academy had judged Nicodemus’s cacography to be proof that he wasn’t the Halcyon.
“Creator be merciful,” Sha
Sha
Whoever had been bribing Nora had changed how he was to meet her. Had he then pushed her off the Spindle Bridge?
Sha
On their flat sides, Magnus runes were as hard as steel; on their edges, sharp as razors. Depending on their conformation, a Magnus sentence could become a nearly unbreakable rope or a deadly blade. Even a casual Magnus attack spell could kill, and the one before Sha
“Burning heaven, Nora,” he swore while closing the journal. “What viper’s nest did you wander into?”
He reached down to touch the wood that the research journal had lain upon. It was a bed chest. His hands felt around the object and found it unlocked.
The hinges creaked as the lid opened. His fingers felt for the chest’s contents and found coins of an unmistakable weight. There was enough gold to buy a Lornish castle.
After closing the chest, he stood and tried to think systematically. Nora had attached herself to an exceedingly wealthy nonacademic, one who wanted to see a sleeping Drum Tower boy, begi
Sha
Sha