steps quickened until he was sprinting across the Stone Court. In a few hours someone would notice the missing Index. Before that happened, he had to hide all of the male cacographers in the compluvium.
CHAPTER
Twenty-seven
On his way up the stairwell, Nicodemus found the Drum Tower silent. He burst into the common room. A chair tried to bite his hip and was knocked flat for its trouble. “John!” he called. “John, wake up! We need to leave.”
He rushed into his chamber and threw open the chest at the foot of his bed. With focused urgency, he pulled his winter cloak around his shoulders and then spread a blanket on the floor. On top of it he put the Index, the coin purse Shannon had given him, and a few spare clothes.
His belt-purse lay on the foot of his sleeping cot. When he grabbed it, his fingers began to tingle. He frowned at first but then remembered the druidic artifact—the wooden sphere encircled by a root—that Deirdre had given him.
The Seed of Finding. He put the druidic artifact on the blanket. He might need that.
After scooping up the blanket and twisting it into a makeshift satchel, he ran into the common room.
“Simple John?” Simple John asked from his doorway. The big man’s candle filled the room with flickering light and long shadows.
“Everything’s all right, John,” Nicodemus said. “But I need your help gathering all our boys. Has Devin come back from her night-time janitorial?”
“No,” the big man said, eyes wide. “No!”
“John, look at me. Something bad has happened. You and I must take all the Drum Tower boys up to the compluvium. We’ll be safe there. And if we’re not, there’s a way we can leave Starhaven altogether.”
The other man shook his head. “No!”
Nicodemus cursed himself. “John, I didn’t mean to upset you. Everything’s going to be fine. But we must go quickly. Get anything you might need out of your room. Warm clothes especially.” Nicodemus moved for the door. “I’ll wake the boys.”
John stepped in front of him. “No!” he again declared, his bulky frame blocking the door.
“John, we have to do this. It’s not safe to stay.” John shook his head.When Nicodemus tried to move past him, John pushed him back with enough force to make him stumble.
“John, listen to me!” Nicodemus said, setting down his makeshift satchel. “We must get the boys to safety.”
This set the big man’s head shaking again.
Nicodemus began to write common language sentences along each of his fingers. Against a normal spellwright, Nicodemus’s disability would have rendered him helpless. But now, facing another cacographer, he could use sentences simple enough for him to avoid misspelling. Simple John wouldn’t be able to edit or disspell them.
“I’m sorry I have to do this,” he said, flicking his hands open and casting glowing white sentences to wrap around John’s arms and legs.
The big man’s candle fell to the floor and winked out. Fortunately, the white glow from Nicodemus’s spells and the moonlight pouring through the windows provided sufficient light.
In an attempt to edit the spells binding his arms, John cast a green sentence from his chin. Nicodemus caught and destroyed it with a disspell. John tried twice more, spitting out the spells like angry words. Even so, he was too slow. Nicodemus censored each sentence with a finger-flicked disspell.
Seeming to realize that he could not compete with Nicodemus magically, John began to flex his massive arms. Two of the binding spells snapped. But even as the big man broke a third line, Nicodemus sent ten more glowing-white sentences, and then ten more.
John made one last, heroic tug, which made him start to fall over. Nicodemus rushed over and grabbed the big man’s arm in time to set him down gently.
John stopped struggling. He was bound as surely as if he were in chains.
“I’m sorry to do this, John,” Nicodemus said. “I’ll untie you when you’re calmer. But you must understand that we are in danger. Unless we take the Drum Tower boys away, they may be hurt.”
John was desperately shaking his head.
“I’m going to wake the boys now,” Nicodemus said. “I’ll come back, and we’ll get you ready to go too. All right?” He moved for the door.
Simple John made a sound then, a faint rumbling, as if a beehive were humming in his expansive chest. “Nnnn…no…nnn,” he growled. “Nnnn…nnn…Nico no.”
“John, you said something different!”
“Nnnnn…Nnnnico not go.”
Nicodemus shook his head. “I need to step out quickly. I’ll be right back. Don’t worry.”
John flinched. “Sstsss…strange man tells Simple John