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“Oh, we know what the individual words mean,” he said, sounding vaguely patronizing. “The first one, askion, translates roughly as ‘shadowless ones,’ probably some reference to the gods. The problem is that each word is only a mnemonic aid, a memory prompt for a line of text.”
“It’s only one word out of a whole line? What happened to the rest?”
“That’s the point. Together, the complete text forms a spell too important, too powerful, for anyone to risk writing it down in its entirety.” He grinned, a flash of large white teeth in his freckled face. “Except once.”
“Let me guess. The Codex contains the full spell.”
“The oldest riddle in all of magic,” Nick said dreamily. “The secret to ultimate power.”
I was beginning to understand why the Dark Fey king wanted the Codex so badly. “Sounds like something people might have wanted to hold on to.”
“It’s the same old story,” Nick said, his smile slipping. “A group of power-hungry leaders, probably of the Artemis cult, didn’t want to risk it falling out of their hands. So they only transmitted the full spell orally. But when the temple burned to the ground in 356 B.C., they all died.”
“And since no one had ever written it down—”
&
nbsp; “No one knew what it meant.”
“Well, that was stupid.”
“Exactly. It is possible to be too careful. Sometimes you can lose more by being overly cautious than by taking a necessary risk.”
“Like telling me where Pritkin is?” I asked idly.
“Yes, I—” Nick stopped, frowning. “You tricked me.” He sounded more surprised than upset.
“Where is he?”
“You need to give him some time. He’s—”
“Had as much as I have, and I was attacked, too. I need to talk to him, Nick.”
“I really don’t think—”
I leaned across the table, slamming a hand down on his precious pile of books. Keeping my temper these days was starting to take a lot more concentration than I could spare. “Here’s the thing, Nick. Tonight I have to pay a visit to the Consul, who has a bit of a short fuse and is already less than pleased with me. So I really need to know if a ticked-off demon lord is likely to crash the party. And the only way I can get that information is to talk to your buddy.”
“I understand, but you have to consider—”
“And when I need to do that is now.”
His frown deepened. “Are you trying to intimidate me? Because I think you should know—”
“I thought all war mages were sworn to the Pythia’s service.” Not that they recognized me as holding the office legitimately, or had so far shown any loyalty whatsoever. But supposedly Nick felt otherwise. Or else I had to wonder what he was doing here.
“Well, yes, technically, but—”
“I’m Pythia,” I reminded him. “And you’re a war mage. I don’t have to intimidate you for information you are duty bound to provide.”
Nick blinked at me a couple of times, then sighed and rubbed his eyes. He looked like he was getting a headache. “He’s in the training salle.”
“Where you should have been half an hour ago,” Pritkin said crisply, from behind me. I jumped and a hand reached out to steady me. “If you kept your appointments, you wouldn’t have to browbeat information out of my colleague.”
Nick looked as surprised to see Pritkin as I was despite the fact that he’d been facing the door. I had this weird picture flash across my mind of Pritkin simply materializing out of thin air, like his father, before I squashed it. He was corporeal, all right, just damn sneaky.
“She didn’t browbeat me,” Nick said, offended.
Pritkin shot him a look. “Of course not.” He was wearing gray sweats that looked like he’d already run a marathon in them. He gave my outfit a long look, but didn’t comment. “Get changed and come with me.”
