CHAPTER Eighteen

Six of Starhaven's twenty eastern towers held the Sataal Landing more than four hundred feet above ground. Nicodemus tried not to think about the height as he walked eastward along the thin stone concourse. Every fifty feet or so, he climbed a few broad steps to the next plaza.

The surrounding towers and nearby mountains blocked direct sunlight from the landing for all but a few hours during the day. The Chthonics had once cultivated a shade garden here. Antiquarians wrote of tall mountain laurels and soil beds bursting with angel wings, fetterbush, and barronwort.

Now the soil beds nurtured only weeds and ivy. Moss bristled between the wall stones. Feral cats skulked about the place looking for fresh water. Nicodemus couldn't see anyone following him but guessed a subtextualized sentinel was near.

As he ventured farther east, the towers crowded closer. At each new level, the plaza was smaller, the stairway narrower.

Finally the landing terminated in a small, mossy cloister. Nicodemus found his way blocked by the thirty-foot wall that ran between the abandoned Itan and Karkin Towers. A row of metal rungs climbed halfway up the wall to a narrow walkway. Voices echoed from above.

Nicodemus scaled the ladder and found its rungs s.p.a.ced too closely for human comfort. The Chthonics must have had small hands, he decided. Or maybe small claws? Or perhaps they had had no claws or hands at all but had gripped the rungs with their teeth.

On top of the walkway stood a smiling Magister Shannon with Azure on his shoulder. The old man was cheerfully lecturing four Northern sentinels: "...obvious reasons the compluvium's constructs are written aggressively. So we mustn't-ah, Nicodemus, you're here at last."

The sentinels, three men, one woman, all were roughly sixty years in age and wearing gold or silver b.u.t.tons on their sleeves. They examined Nicodemus with narrowed eyes. Shannon laughingly introduced them as his personal guards.

Nicodemus bowed. He understood their confused looks. They had beensent to investigate Shannon and were taken aback by the old man's enthusiasm. Nicodemus couldn't blame them.

Shannon grabbed Nicodemus's arm and pulled him through the crowd. The old wizard's grip felt like a vise.

The walkway on which they were standing ran into a crevice where the Karkin Tower met the wall. Here a narrow staircase climbed to the wall's top. A seven-foot-tall gargoyle stood guard on the bottommost step.

Its muscled body would have been humanoid, save for the two extra arms growing under the expected pair. And the stone wings bulging from its back would have resembled bird wings but for the two additional carpal joints that allowed the limbs to fold into tight, fiddlehead spirals. Its giant hawk's head glared at the spellwrights with stony eyes.

Shannon was again lecturing the sentinels. "Those of you who've dealt with a war-weight gargoyle will remember that they are dangerous, valuable, and fractious. So use great care when presenting these pa.s.swords." The old man produced a scroll from his sleeve and began pulling off Numinous paragraphs.

Nicodemus watched as Shannon handed a set of pa.s.swords to each sentinel. The Northerners, however, were studying the ma.s.sive gargoyle and glancing at one another.

Suddenly Nicodemus realized that Shannon was allowing the golden paragraphs to fold into pleated and stacked sheets: this conformation stabilized much of its language but strained those sentences that folded the text. Such tension could cause rearrangement or fragmentation.

Sure enough, when Shannon handed a copy of the pa.s.swords to the female sentinel, two bending sentences snapped.

Nicodemus spoke up, "Magister, her text has-"

"Don't worry, lad. I'll take you through myself. Excuse me, spellwrights. My apprentice has not yet mastered Numinous."

He grabbed Nicodemus again and dragged him to the ma.s.sive gargoyle. Nicodemus's stomach knotted until the old man released his arm and held out two pa.s.sword texts.

The gargoyle extended its four arms. Each pair of hands took a paragraph and began to fold them. If written correctly, the spells would fold into a pre-set shape.

When the aquiline gargoyle had creased each paragraph into a small starlike shape, it chirped and moved aside.

Shannon put a hand on Nicodemus's back and guided him onto the stairway between the Karkin Tower and the wall.

Behind them, two sentinels held out their pa.s.swords to the gargoyle's many arms.

"Be ready for anything," Shannon muttered.

Confused, Nicodemus turned back just as the war-weight gargoyle began shrieking. Two bulky stone arms struck the wall with percussive force. A wing unfurled to block the pa.s.sage.

A chorus of shocked sentinel voices came from the other side.

"Magisters," Shannon scolded, "you let the pa.s.swords fragment! How could you be so careless with a pleated sheet? Check the other two paragraphs."

An apologetic female voice replied that they too had deconstructed.

"Wonderful," Shannon barked. "I can't cast Numinous past this war-weight gargoyle without exciting it to violence."

A dour male voice replied, "Magister, we've orders not to lose sight of you."

Shannon laughed. "A fine job you've made of that. Now Nicodemus and I lack the protection we were promised. Burning heaven! I've a mind to complain to Amadi of this."

The sentinels were silent.

Shannon instructed them to hurry down to the ground level and then hike back up the Itan Tower. From there they might reach the Spindle Bridge. He and Nicodemus would wait on the bridge. "Make it back in an hour and Amadi needn't know," he said and then turned to hike up the steps toward the top of the wall.

The sentinels set off in the opposite direction. Nicodemus hurried after the old man.

"Now we may speak freely," Shannon said with satisfaction. "Even the subtextualized sentinel following you can't get past that brute."

Nicodemus frowned. "Magister, the pa.s.swords were misspelled?"

"Not in the least," Shannon said, turning back long enough to wink a blind eye. "They couldn't have been spelled more correctly."

IN THE I ITAN Tower, Deirdre laughed at what she saw through the window bars. Tower, Deirdre laughed at what she saw through the window bars.

She was standing next to Kyran in an abandoned Chthonic hallway-a dark place with slate floors, cracked walls of deep-blue plaster, a black ceiling shaped like roots or rocks. Everything was coated with centuries of dust.

Bright autumn sunlight slanted in through the barred windows, illuminating clouds of languid dust motes. A hand moving through the chilly air spun a few bright specks; Kyran's body pulled with it a maelstrom of flying, sunlit dirt.

"Shannon's used the hawk-headed construct to fool the Northern wizards," Deirdre said. "The simpletons are hurrying down toward the ground. Ky, go and follow them. I want to know if they report his trick."

"I shouldn't leave you."

She turned to look at her protector. Though stooped and leaning on his thick walking staff, he still had to hold his head at an awkward angle to avoid the low ceiling. It made him seem like a giant.

"Are we having this argument again?" she asked, smiling. "You know I never lose."

"Because you never argue about what matters."

"Ky, this is not the time. I need you to watch those wizards."

"There's not another soul for a half mile. Even the black-robes don't come here."

Her smile wilted.

His dark eyes glared at her. Then, with a barely audible grunt, he nodded. One long stride brought him to the barred window. The sunlight turned his hair to gleaming gold, his robes to solar white. He watched the four sentinels hurrying down the stone platform, then turned and strode away down the hall, his walking staff clicking against the stone floor.

Deirdre looked out the window again. Shannon and Nicodemus were hiking up the steep stairway between the wall and the tower. She would need to climb up a few more floors to keep them in view. She set off in the opposite direction from Kyran.

For once, Deirdre was not irritated by her short stature. She did not need to stoop when stepping through the Chthonic doorways, nor did her small feet slip on the short steps.

A cloud of pigeons shot past a nearby window. Deirdre found herself thinking about Shannon. Was Nicodemus's trust in the old wizard well placed? Dare she approach him?

Because she was preoccupied with these questions, it wasn't until she had completed a circuit around the tower, and so climbed to the next level, that she noticed the footsteps.

She stopped near the top of the staircase. The footsteps ceased as well. "Ky," she called, "you're to follow the sentinels, not follow me around like a mother hen."

At first silence greeted her words. But then the footsteps returned at a sprint.

Deirdre's heart began to pound. The wizards had not allowed her to wear a blade. Instinctively, her eyes searched about for a weapon and fell on the horizontal bars the Chthonics had built into their windows. She rushed over and grabbed two rods that had been drilled into the window frame.

No living man could have pulled them free. But Deirdre needed only toput one foot on the wall and heave. The bars exploded from the frame with small clouds of pulverized stone.

The footsteps were loud and echoing now. She crouched and held the two steel bars up in Spirish fighting fashion.

The figure that came running up the staircase wore a tattered white cloak-more a hastily sewn sheet than a proper garment. A voluminous hood covered his head and face.

As Deirdre raised her crude weapons, the creature ran through a square sunbeam. An object extending from his hand became a blazing rectangle of reflected light.

The glare momentarily dazzled her eyes, so it wasn't until the creature was a few steps away that she identified the steel object as an ancient Lornish greatsword.

"LISTEN CAREFULLY," Shannon said, stepping onto the wall at the end of the Sataal Landing. "We don't have much time."

Azure was riding on the wizard's shoulder and using her eyes to see for him.

"Of course, Magis-"

A few inches ahead, the wall plummeted roughly seventy feet to the shaded impluvium: a deep rainwater reservoir that provided water to Starhaven's inhabited quarters through a series of aqueducts. Beneath the surface lay ma.s.sive valves and floodgates. Around them moved what Nicodemus first took to be bulbous gray fish, but then he realized they were the water gargoyles that operated the valves.

Beyond the impluvium stretched a mile-wide half-bowl of roofs, gables, and gutters that funneled rain down to the reservoir. This meta-structure, composed of the southeast quarter's many different contiguous buildings, was known as the compluvium; and everywhere on it-squatting, stooping, or crawling-were the gutter gargoyles. The constructs were busy mucking leaves out of the aqueducts, scaring off birds, or mending leaky roofs.

"Amazing," Nicodemus half-whispered.

"All of these gargoyles are controlled by a faction to which I once belonged," Shannon explained, hurrying toward a spiral staircase on the wall's opposite end. "If you or the Drum Tower is ever endangered, you must bring all the male cacographers here. That brute down by the Sataal Landing will obey your commands. You're to bring the boys here to the compluvium and hide them; it's a large place and the gargoyles know many secret nooks."

Nicodemus swallowed. "Endangered by what? The murderer? The sentinels?"

"I'll answer in a moment," Shannon huffed. "First let's be clear about what you are to do. Come." They reached the spiral staircase and hurried down the narrow steps. Azure had to bob her head to keep a clear view of where they were going.

At the bottom of the stairs stood a gated tunnel leading into a building Nicodemus didn't recognize.

Using a few Numinous pa.s.swords, Shannon opened the gate and pulled it wide. "If danger finds you even in the compluvium, lead the boys through here." Azure whistled nervously as they stepped into the tunnel. "Watch your head."

The tunnel proved to be both dark and long. But together master and apprentice trudged through ankle-deep water to another gate. Shannon sprang the lock and led Nicodemus onto a short walkway that faced the sheer rock face of the Pinnacle Mountains.

They had come onto Starhaven's easternmost wall.

Shannon hurried along the walkway to the Spindle Bridge's landing. Standing beside the bridge was another of the four-armed, hawk-headed gargoyles.

Shannon stopped before the gargoyle and turned to his apprentice. "You are to bring the boys to this construct. He guards a system of constructs and spells we call the Fool's Ladder. It's the only way out of Starhaven beside the front gate. If need be, you can escape into the forest and then lead the boys down to Gray's Crossing." He withdrew a pouch from his robes and tossed it to Nicodemus.

When the younger man caught the bag, it clinked. "Magister!" he exclaimed while peering inside. "There's enough gold here to buy the whole town of Gray's Crossing."

"Hopefully there's enough to buy escape or protection."

"But shouldn't I just find you if there's danger?"

"There might not be time to find me." He closed his blind eyes and rubbed them. "Besides, if you truly are in danger, it will be because I am dead."

THE BLADE FLASHING toward Deirdre's throat was spotted with rust. toward Deirdre's throat was spotted with rust.

She leaped backward, gracefully finding new footing on the narrow steps. Her opponent's crude white hood still covered his face. She wondered how the creature saw. She also wondered why he had risked an attack inside Starhaven, where he could not use magic.

The thing advanced with a backhand stroke. She met the blade with a parry of her right bar. The force of the creature's blow nearly knocked thebar from her hand. The thing possessed strength that rivaled her own. She threw a quick overhand slash with her left bar.

The creature brought up his left arm in time to save his head.

The steel bar smashed into the thing's forearm with enough force to crack a boulder. But there was no crunch of bone. The rod sank two inches into the arm and stuck.

The creature twisted away. In her shock, Deirdre lost her grip on the bar and it slid from her fingers. The monster lunged at her with another thrust.

Deirdre danced away but caught her heel and toppled backward onto the stairs. The creature raised the sword overhead; her bar was still stuck in his forearm.

Clay! she realized. The d.a.m.ned thing was made out of clay!

The greatsword flew downward. Deirdre rolled right and heard the weapon crash against the step beside her. When she looked up, the blade was again flashing toward her.

With both hands, she threw up her remaining bar. Steel met steel with a deafening clang. She kicked down, slamming her heel into the thing's knee. Any blood-and-bone joint would have snapped, but she felt the creature's flesh give.