Spellbreaker: Book 3 of the Spellwright Trilogy. Blake Charlton

But when she was lying still, she found she could not stop wondering about what was going to fill her with such apprehension in less than an hour’s time. She tossed and turned for a while longer and then gave up on sleep and walked out to her deck.

      The morning was darkening as a fat cloud occluded the sky above the pool. She looked down into the water, a few scattered rain drops were falling. A light, warm tropical rain.

      It was high tide now and the torch left on the dock was still burning. Leandra looked down into the pellucid water and was shocked to see a massive, nightmarelike figure slip through the now submarine opening that admitted her catamaran. The creature swam a powerful circle around the pool, causing the surface to churn into small whirlpools and eddies.

      Leandra hurried to the rope ladder. “Should I follow—” Dhrun asked before Leandra interrupted. “No, stay here. I’ll send for you in a moment.”

      She hurried down the ladder and across the boardwalk. By the time she reached the dock, Holokai was already sitting at its edge, wet, humanoid, naked. He was breathing hard but grinning. “Fast, huh?” he said with a grin. “I told you I was feeling strong. I think even more people have been praying for me lately. But, I could eat for three days straight.”

      “Poor hunting on the way back?” she asked. Usually Holokai returned from a long swim with a belly full of harbor seal.

      He shook his head. “No time. About five miles outside the Cerulean Strait, I circled a few times below an inbound Southern ship. But when I came near the surface, I woke something up. Never felt a presence like that before. Hey, Lea, why don’t you tell me next time you send me to surf a tidal wave, huh?” He laughed.

      Leandra’s belly began to hurt. “What do you mean?”

      “You know … you know how it is. My kind, in my element, I can feel another like me. I don’t like getting too close, especially in open water. But maybe that’s just me, you know?”

      “Holokai,” Leandra interrupted, her patience thinning, “what did you sense out there? Another god?”

      His face became thoughtful. “Yeah, like another god. But not another god, I don’t think. It’s funny, Lea, the presence … it was like … like …”

      Leandra’s belly began to ache with anxiety. “Did you breech?”

      “Very briefly, just got one eye above the water. Some of those Southern sailor boys like to get brave with harpoons and I’m hungry, yeah, but I’m not that hungry.” He grimaced, maybe remembering the last time he had eaten a sailor.

      “But the ship’s name, Kai, the thing written in gold leaf on the side of the ship, what did it read?”

      Holokai frowned. Reading was not his strong point when his eyes were all black. At last he said, “The High Queen’s Lance.”

      Leandra groaned. Her parents had fallen in love during the political intrigue in the Spirish city of Avel that involved a Spirish airship named the Queen’s Lance.

      “Lea, you know what I think the presence was that I felt. It was like … well … from what you told me I think it was like …”

      “Like a dragon?” Lea asked.

      “Hey, how’d you know?”

      Leandra growled a word in two clipped syllables as only an irate adult child can: “Moth-er.”

       CHAPTER SEVEN

      Nicodemus and the neodemon wearing his daughter’s face stared at each other with incomprehension. “Your daughter’s face?” the River Thief asked.

      “You’re …” Nicodemus stuttered. “You’re impersonating her?”

      “Leandra Weal? The Warden of Ixos?” the River Thief asked. “She has my face?”

      “You have hers.”

      The River Thief’s eyes narrowed with sudden comprehension. “So …” All six of her hands tightened around their knives.

      Nicodemus dodged just as the neodemon’s right uppermost arm flicked back and then forward. Her throwing dagger passed within an inch of his shoulder as he misspelled the last of censoring texts from his mind. The River Thief leapt forward with a three-arm knife thrust. Nicodemus danced back but not before her lowermost knife cut into his hip.

      “Stop!” Nicodemus cried and pulled a blasting spell from his stomach. He flicked it at the neodemon’s feet with his right hand while using his left to cast a shielding spell on the deck before him.

      A wall of protective indigo words shot up to Nicodemus’s waist. The River Thief lunged again, this time leading with the kris in her mid-left hand. But Nicodemus ducked below his shielding spell just as his blasting spell detonated. A shockwave momentarily knocked every thought from Nicodemus’s mind and set his ears ringing.

      In the next instant, he found himself staggering to his feet. Two sailors were charging, knives raised. “Rory!” Nicodemus called as he reached to his hip and pulled free a coruscation of paragraphs that leapt from his skin to form a two-handed textual sword. “Rory, now!”

      To Nicodemus’s relief and horror, the deck before the charging sailors exploded into an array of razor-thin spikes each five or six feet in length. The giant splinters punched straight into the sailors’ legs and bellies.

      The night erupted into screams. Nicodemus looked around and saw that every one of the River Thief’s sailors had been similarly impaled by a nightmare blossoming of splinters.

      A booming crash turned Nicodemus’s eyes starboard. His blasting text had knocked the River Thief into the gunnel; there, Rory had made the wood come alive with spikes, one or two of which had pierced the neodemon’s side but most had broken harmlessly. Large barklike growths had emerged from the gunnel to envelop three of the neodemon’s arms. But the blue-green aura surrounding the River Thief ignited into flames and burned her restraints.

      Suddenly, the barge lurched and Nicodemus nearly lost his balance. A fountain of water erupted from the river behind the neodemon as she tore herself free of the barklike bindings.

      “Goddess, wait!” Nicodemus yelled. “It doesn’t have to be like this!”

      The neodemon turned toward him. Her eyes burned with a merciless white light. She advanced, more carefully now. The barge shook again and Nicodemus stumbled. The River Thief danced forward, slashing with first her left middle arm then all of her right arms. Nicodemus met the first slash with his textual sword then jumped back to avoid the other blades. With a yell and downward slash, he severed her right uppermost arm at the elbow.

      Shrieking, the neodemon lurched backward. Nicodemus pressed his attack and knocked free another of her knives. He was about to thrust into her gut when she jumped away and fell. A roar of thrashing water erupted from somewhere behind Nicodemus. The barge lurched again.

      “Goddess, yield! It doesn’t have to be like this!” Nicodemus yelled again.

      “There’s no safe place!” She raised two of her hands in clenched fists and suddenly the deck bucked. Nicodemus fell forward.

      “The hull’s cracking!” yelled a muffled voice that Nicodemus recognized as Rory’s. He glimpsed the druid’s white robes as the man pulled himself up from the hatch. “Nico, she’s using her godspell to batter the ship. If we go under, we all die!”

      The River Goddess hissed. With one of her arms she grabbed Nicodemus’s foot and with the other she started to drive a dirk into his calf. But where she touched him, the blue-green fire of her aura vanished as his cacography misspelled her godspell.

      She shrieked and pulled her hand back. Her knife had not sunk more than an inch into Nicodemus’s calf.

      Nicodemus had lost the sword text,