tore through his throat.
He was shouting wordlessly.
His tailbone struck ground and shot a jolt of agony up his spine. He fell backward and stared at the ceiling.
“Nico!” exclaimed John. Suddenly the big man was leaning over Nicodemus, bending down to grab his shoulder.
“Don’t touch me!” Nicodemus bellowed, whipping his arm around to cast out a hasty sheet of Magnus.
The spell flashed out into a plate of silver light that smashed into John’s hand. The misspelled text shattered but not before breaking the big man’s ring finger back until it snapped.
John cried out as the spell sent him sprawling backward.
Nicodemus pushed himself away from John. “STAY BACK!” he yelled at Shannon and Deirdre as they stepped toward him.
Hot tears blinded his eyes. Mucus coated his upper lip.
“No one touch me!” he bawled. “No one touch me ever again!”
CHAPTER
Forty-one
Nicodemus let go of Shannon, who turned away to vomit Magnus bywords on the ground.
No one spoke as he retched. Azure reformed her textual connection to Shannon and then provided an image of Nicodemus squatting beside him. The firelight made the boy’s green eyes seem darker, more haunted.
“Well?” The old wizard spat out a last bit of the diseased language.
“I consolidated the canker into a single mass at the top of your stomach,” Nicodemus said quietly. “Since I dealt only with that text, I created no new curses. But my touch has made the canker more malicious.”
Shannon looked down at his belly. Indeed, a small stream of silver prose was already leaking into his stomach.
Above them, the cold wind was blowing harder through the trees.
“We must get you to Boann,” Nicodemus said flatly. “Now she can cut out the curse.” He looked at Deirdre. She nodded.
“I still don’t like it,” Shannon grumbled. He thought again about how Nicodemus had come out of the Bestiary, weeping, terrified, and filled with revelations about the prophecies and Language Prime. “What if Fellwroth is waiting for us?”
“He might be,” Nicodemus replied in an exhausted voice. “But it’s our only option now. Chimera has made me the Storm Petrel, made me mutagenic.”
He paused to close his eyes. “I would sooner die than stay this way. Alliance with Boann is my only hope. And she is your only hope, Magister. Only she can cut this canker out of you.”
“He’s right, Shannon,” Deirdre said from the other side of the campfire.
Nicodemus stood. “John, are you all right?”
The big man was crouched beside the fire, gingerly holding his right hand. Shannon had splinted the broken finger with a Magnus passage. “Yes,” John said slowly. “I am fine.”
“John, I am sorry.”
The big man laughed. “I’ll say it again: I’m happier with a broken finger than I would be with a canker curse.”
Through Azure’s eyes, Shannon watched an ivy leaf shudder in thewind. “Very well, if we’re determined to go dashing into danger, let’s do it before it gets too late. I’m old and it’s nearing my bedtime.”
No one laughed.
BEFORE THEY LEFT the ruins, Nicodemus walked into the woods. Making water was his excuse. But as soon as he was away from the firelight, he collapsed.
No tears came. No expression of agony twisted his face. But his chest rose and fell, rose and fell until his fingers and forearms tingled. The world began to spin.
Regaining control, he slowed his breath until the tingling left his fingers. He felt hollow. He was the Storm Petrel, the monster.
The insistent wind rushed through the trees. Beyond their leaves shone the icy light of stars.
He stood and wandered until he found a creek. To his eyes, all living things now radiated Language Prime’s soft cyan light. This allowed him to see the glow of several tiny fish swimming in the black water.
He wrote a net of simple Magnus sentences and used it to pull a fry from the water. With the silvery sentences, he held the tiny fish before his frowning face. He dropped it into his open palm.
The poor creature flopped about in his palm. Nicodemus could feel the thing’s Language Prime text changing every time its cold scales touched his skin. He could feel the power of his spellwriting accelerating the changes.
In only a few moments a shiny black growth bulged out of the fry’s gills. “It’s true,” he mumbled, and his eyes filled with tears.
He killed the fish with a quick, clinching paragraph and watched as its cyan glow began to fade. It took a long time.
At last he dropped the fry and buried his face in his hands.
Before him shone an image of the