would set the entire western wing of Severn Hold on fire, killing a horse and maiming two stable boys.
“Wake!” Nicodemus shouted. “Wake up!” But his boyish self slept on. He tried to move but found his adult legs paralyzed. The window above young Nicodemus creaked open.
A thick arm of ghostly white ivy vines grew with jerky, nightmare speed onto the window frame and surrounded the bed. The adult Nicodemus yelled again, trying to wake himself.
The nightmare ivy hadn’t been there when he had been a boy. But now its pale tentacles leaped onto the bed and within moments blanketed the dreaming child with ashen leaves. The world exploded with light. Everywhere flames roared. A horse screamed its death as the rafters came crashing down around Nicodemus. The stone walls tottered and then fell with a deep, grinding growl.
Suddenly nothing hung above Nicodemus but a too-low nightmare sky of seething gray text. Next to him stood April, untouched by flames. “Run, Nicodemus!” she cried. “He has your shadow!” Darkness radiated from her, blotting out the nightmare sky.
“There is no safe place!” Her hair became trains of stars and spread across the growing night sky.
“The white beast will find you unless you fly from Starhaven! Fly with anything you have!”
Her body faded into nothing and her face became the glowing face of the white moon.
“Fly and don’t look back!”
There was a deafening crash and then…blackness.
“Never look back!”
AMADI WAS SITTING in the hallway, using two Magnus clauses to pick splinters from her forearm, when Kale found her.
“Magistra! What happened?”
She flinched as a clause drew out a half inch of bloody wood. “Bookworms infested both sides of a bridge. We were containing the first blast when the second went off in my ear. The deputy provost was right: these worms have an uncanny intelligence. Every time it seems we’ve deconstructed the last one, another violent deconstruction pulls us back into a fray.”
She looked up at her secretary. He had several scrolls tucked under one arm and a thick codex under the other. Behind him stood the two sentinels who had been guarding Shannon’s quarters.
“And what in the burning hells took you so long?” she asked. “The Drum Tower guards were here an hour ago.”
Kale smiled. “News most wonderful! We found a wounded bookworm responding to a leftover homing passage.”
He held out one of the scrolls. “Six minor libraries are fighting infestation now. But so far the Main Library has remained free of infection, thank Hakeem. And Starhaven is doing a remarkable job of hiding the whole affair. But still, there is fierce fighting in all of the infected libraries. And it seems that in one of them this bookworm was wounded in a very fortuitous way.”
“Fortuitous?” Amadi accepted the scroll.
“By chance, a disspell destroyed most of this bookworm’s executive text. So the construct resorted to an older, previously disabled protocol about what to do if wounded.” He held out another scroll.
Amadi took it and then looked at the two sentinels who had been on guard duty. Kale was only a lesser wizard, and the bookworms were written in Numinous and Magnus. “You two subdued the construct and then parsed its structure?”
They nodded vigorously.
Kale piped up again. “All the other wounded bookworms have been returning to another location. But this one had been wounded in such a way that it couldn’t. However, we were able to learn where it should have gone.”
Amadi raised her eyebrows.
“The bookworms have been subtextualizing themselves and returning to a private library in a tower near the Bolide Garden,” he explained. “There they’ve been engulfing some text stored there. Once recovered they head back out to infect other libraries.”
“So the author of these bookworms set up this private library as a base for the bookworms?”
Kale held out the rest of his scrolls and the codex. “Just so. And the worms can subtextualize themselves well enough that we never would have found it if it weren’t for this wounded worm. In any case, when we found the place, we disspelled the worms and then investigated. That’s where we found these.”
Amadi set the scrolls on the ground and turned her attention to the codex. “And what are they?”
“What you’re holding now is Nora Finn’s research journal.”
Amadi looked up sharply. “The journal Shannon claimed the clay monster ran off with?”
Kale’s smile seemed wide enough to split his face in half. “Exactly! It seems that Nora Finn was taking bribes from a Spirish noble to watch a certain student. And seems there still is another