Back inside the Index, stars of silver and gold appeared. Nicodemus’s perception of the book’s night sky was rapidly improving; within moments he could see for untold miles. The starry array stretched endlessly away.
Suddenly he realized what he was looking at. These were not stars, but spells. His vision confirmed it. He was staring through the Index at every text contained within Starhaven.
He must be thinking through the spells attached to the Index; he was having quaternary thoughts. It was a glorious, dreamlike feeling. But his elation faded as he remembered why he had entered the Index in the first place.
He needed to find the touch spell.
A white star flashed brighter and began to speed toward him like a comet. An instant later, the spell crashed into him with a soundless explosion.
Removing his hand from the Index made Nicodemus’s mind drop like a lightning bolt back into his head. He blinked. Returning to the bony confines of his skull was intensely uncomfortable. He shook his head and felt his ideas slosh around like seaweed.
“Oh…yuck!” he said.
Gradually his mind molded itself to his skull. And he found that he could think clearly again.
A new knowledge of the simple touch spell was now inside of him. The spell’s primary sequence burned before his eyes as clearly as if he had just written it out a thousand times. But some of the runes were out of order—he knew because touch was one of the few spells simple enough that he had memorized its proper spelling.
Now he was sure: contact with his mind had misspelled one of the Order’s most prized artifacts.
Nicodemus put his hands to his face. “No…no…” he whimpered. Shame and guilt throbbed behind his eyes. He would forever be known as the cacographer who had destroyed Starhaven’s most valuable artifact.
“Wait!” he sputtered. “Wait.” There was one last hope. Perhaps if he could repair his disabled mind, he could repair the Index. “Show me,” he ordered the Index, “any mundane documents relating to curing cacography.”
As the book began flipping pages, Nicodemus looked up and muttered a prayer to Hakeem. When the Index stopped, he took a deep breath and looked down, ready to read.
But the page was blank.
BREATH SPILLED OUT of Nicodemus. His cacography had destroyed the Index. Maybe he’d vomit again.
“I had better be the Halcyon,” he mumbled to himself while pressing a hand to his belly. If he wasn’t, he’d never forgive himself for destroying such a beautiful artifact.
His hands began to tremble.
“Los damn it!” he growled. “I will not be like this.” He closed his eyes. “I won’t be weak. I won’t be crippled.”
He had to regain his determination to defeat the golem and erase his cacography. He could do it, if he was bold enough, disciplined enough. There was no time for fear or guilt.
He glared at the Index and cleared his mind of everything but the three asterisks of Shannon’s research journal. Then he placed his palm on the blank page before him.
His mind shot upward like an arrow into another plane. But rather than a starry night sky, he floated before a massive golden wall that stretched out almost endlessly in either direction. The wall itself was made of Shannon’s Numinous prose.
Nicodemus found himself staring at the journal’s first page, dated more than twenty years ago.
Simply by thinking of a later entry, Nicodemus sent the wall sliding to his left. Looking at the wall’s distant end, he saw that the text bent back to form a massive circle.
The codex-as-ring spun past in a golden blur. Then, without warning, it slammed to a dizzying, soundless stop.
Shannon’s last entry glowed before him. It was a long Numinous spell annotated by common language sentences that glowed green.
Nicodemus frowned, trying to glean the text’s purpose. The prose seemed to be that of a disspell, but it was not of the typical nonsense or antisense varieties. Its structure was that of a clamp.
That made no sense. Normally disspells sought to pull apart another spell’s argument. This disspell looked as if it would try to hold the other text together.
Nicodemus turned to the annotations. As he read, a smile spread across his face. “Magister,” he whispered. “It’s brilliant!”
It was not a disspell at all, but an attack spell adapted to hold magical prose inside of a golem. If Nicodemus cast this text on the golem, its spirit would be trapped. The author would be vulnerable.
Abruptly Shannon’s spell rushed forward to crash into Nicodemus’s mind. The rush of golden prose dazzled his