Spellbreaker by Blake Charlton Page B

screamed.
    â€œGoddess, you have to yield!” Again the boat heaved. Nicodemus and the neodemon slid across a deck to slam into the gunnel.
    â€œWe’re taking on water!” Rory yelled.
    â€œGoddess!” Nicodemus yelled. “Yield!”
    â€œI cannot,” the River Thief gasped while trying to free her arm from Nicodemus’s grasp. With two of her other arms, she grabbed the top of the gunnel.
    â€œDon’t let her into the water!” Rory cried just as the neodemon shrieked, “Let me go!”
    â€œYield!” Nicodemus bellowed.
    She continued to struggle, all her arms flailing. Something sharp cut into Nicodemus’s shoulder. “There can be peace no more!” the neodemon yelled. “I see her now. She will end this world!”
    Nicodemus caught another of her hands. Their faces were now inches apart; her blank white eyes stared into his green ones. “Peace no more,” she whispered, and then, instead of trying to escape, she wrapped all her arms and her legs around Nicodemus. The air around them crackled as his cacography misspelled her.
    â€œWait,” Nicodemus cried. “Wait, you—” He needed to know why she was wearing his daughter’s face and if she truly was a demon of the Ancient Continent. But the River Thief grasped him tighter. In a blaze of blue and green scintilla, she dissolved into light and air.
    Nicodemus found himself lying in darkness, bleeding onto the deck.

 
    CHAPTER EIGHT
    Francesca DeVega watched the sailors race about the deck and swarm over the rigging. To the east, dawn limned the Ixonian headlands with sunlight. The new day was dappled with seaborne clouds.
    The sight made Francesca’s chest tighten, a familiar sensation since leaving Starfall Island a month ago. The news she was bringing Nicodemus could not be trusted to a messenger or colaboris spell, so she had been forced to leave the Dralish pantheon to the chaos it called self-governance. If the Council had been successful, warships were even now sailing toward Chandralu. Compounding Francesca’s political worries was the anticipation of reunion with her husband and daughter. So, a lovely jaunt through the tropics this would not be. Pity. She could use one.
    Last night Francesca had woken in her cabin with the knowledge that an unknown sea deity was circling below their ship. It was a strong divine presence; one that made Francesca’s textual mind flare into prophetic calculation. As had happened only briefly since her confrontation with Typhon thirty years ago, Francesca had perceived the future as a landscape into which she was traveling.
    It had been a fleeting glimpse, and she had gained only three insights. First, the deity swimming below her might, in the coming days, kill her. Second, most of her futures and the sea deity’s futures intersected at Chandralu’s infirmary. How, she couldn’t say. And third, the coming events in Chandralu had the potential for vast and permanent consequences in all six human kingdoms.
    This last insight was a confirmation of what she had already suspected, the news she was bringing to Nicodemus being what it was. She prayed again to the Creator that the Council had been successful and that the forces of Dral and Lorn had been marshaled and dispatched to Ixos.
    After sensing the sea deity, Francesca had risen from her bunk, unintentionally waking her student and cabin mate. She had hurried on deck to peer down into the starlit waters in hopes of spotting her future opponent. A kraken god perhaps? A whale goddess? Some divinity complex of human and marine animal? She wanted to glimpse at least some part of it. Maybe just a tentacle? But the divinity circled the boat only once more and swam with shocking speed north toward Chandralu.
    Her student, the physician Ellen D’Valin, had followed her on deck and was soon joined by the twin druids, Tam and Kenna, both of Thorntree. Ellen had worn the