emerald—small, dark, perfectly lacriform. He tried to feel his fear and anger and self-loathing. But he could feel nothing. So he imagined the emotions becoming light.
He poured the light into the emerald and watched it begin to glow. More and more he poured into the gem until it shone with a brilliance that seemed to penetrate into his body.
When they recovered the gem he would no longer have to be afraid. He would no longer need to feel rage or self-hatred. When they recovered the missing part of himself, he would cease to be a monster.
THE FORESTED HILLS below Starhaven descended in slow undulations for five or six miles to end in the wide oak savanna.
On the border between foothills and grassland, the Westernmost Roadstretched its dusty length from Dar in the north down to the City of Rain in the south.
By the time Nicodemus’s party emerged from the forest to stand on the highway, all three moons had risen. The combined glow bathed the savanna in milky blue light.
As he hugged the Index to his chest, Nicodemus surveyed the few farms and oaks that dotted the landscape. Several trees had died and become wiry skeletons.
Save for the homesteads, waist-high savanna grass covered the earth from road’s edge to distant horizon. Here the wind transformed the grassland into an ocean of rolling waves.
Deirdre took their only horse and galloped ahead to scout for danger.
The three men walked in a close huddle, the wind blowing color into their cheeks and tossing Nicodemus’s long raven hair. Azure often ruffled her feathers and issued low, plaintive squawks.
Nicodemus’s keloid began to burn. Shannon had wrapped the scars with distorting Numinous spells. Nevertheless, he watched as a sphere of Language Prime flew away from him in all directions. The broadcast was diffuse; it wouldn’t reveal his precise location to Fellwroth. But it would tell the monster that he was on the move.
Thinking about this made Nicodemus’s heart beat faster. He closed his eyes and focused on recovering the emerald—of transforming himself from Petrel to Halcyon—until his icy determination returned.
Just then Shannon had to pause to vomit silvery logorrhea bywords.
When they continued their trek, Shannon showed him how to write several common language sentences around the Index so that it would float in a slow circle around the younger man’s waist.
“When wizards must fight,” the old linguist said gravely, “we float our spellbooks like this.”
A moment later, Deirdre returned with auspicious news: there was no sign of wizards in Gray’s Crossing. She had learned from a town watchman that shortly after sundown all the black-robes had run up to Starhaven.
After another quarter hour walking, the town came into view around a bend. It was not much to look at: a huddle of round Lornish cottages clustered around two inns, a smithy, a fuller, and a small common. At the hamlet’s center sat the intersection of the Westernmost Road and the smaller road that ran up to Starhaven. Most of the inhabitants were farmers or shop-keepers who sold to the wizards.
With Deirdre leading the way, the party hurried off the road and into the trees. Cautiously, they picked their way so as to emerge behind the stables of a dilapidated inn named the Wild Crabtree.
Deirdre hustled them into the back of the building and up a flight of rickety stairs. Shannon wrote a flamefly spell and scattered the incandescent paragraphs around the party so as to light the way.
“The inn’s owner is a Highlander,” Deirdre whispered. “He rents the top floor to Dralish smugglers who buy weapons in Spires and run them down to the Highland rebels. There’s a secret compartment in the floor where they hide the blades.”
She stopped before a door. “Be quiet now; I have to let the other devotees of Boann know we are friends.” She knocked twice and then froze.
Her hand had pushed the door open slightly. Inside it was dark and silent.
“Careful,” Shannon whispered, a spherical Magnus spell appearing in his hand.
Deirdre drew the greatsword from her back and then pushed the door wide to let the light from Shannon’s flamefly spell fall into the dark room.
Peering past her shoulder, Nicodemus saw—sprawled across the floor—a motionless body.
THERE WERE EIGHT dead men, three women. Not a drop of blood on any of them.
Shannon found a slowly deconstructing Numinous paragraph lodged behind the ear of one victim. “Fellwroth,” he said, inspecting the text. “Attacked maybe twenty hours ago.”
The three connected rooms were spacious and sparsely furnished. Nicodemus walked into the farthest room and