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BOOKS BY ANTHONY HUSO
Forthcoming
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ANTHONY HUSO
A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK 
NEW YORK
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Huso
All rights reserved.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
ISBN 978-0-7653-2516-7
First Edition: August 2010
FOR
SLEN
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I OWE a debt of gratitude to Marc Laidlaw for peddling my jank, Paula Guran for believing in it and Paul Stevens and the people at Tor for taking a chance.
I also want to thank Chris Duden and Gary Webb for their steadfast support and encouragement and James Papworth for being my first real mentor in writing.
Additionally, nothing in this book would be what it is without the infinite lost hours of Poy (Phanty), Chappy (Vlon), Tone (Rill) and Mike (Karakael) or “Jason: the Hermit” (and his assorted bloody sacrifices).
Thanks also to Barno, Bob, Suzy, Ted, Jen, Twi and of course Nikki.
I wrote this story because it Rained.
suggests the thing was commissioned by an Ublisi, authored at S
th and bound in c
lshydra hide.
Page 349: the Ublisi is actually quoted, “Write1 the math of Ahvell 
. Write everything your eyes foresee. We must find our way back . . . use a rune of lian ink on the cover . . . it must be slippery . . . this codex must stay hidden in order to survive.”
Page 351: it is a red book containing, “Secret patterns on sheets of skin . . . a byname . . . no proper title . . . referred to sometimes as the
srym T
.”
—PERSONAL NOTES OF MORGAN GULLOWS
1 A homographic ambiguity in Dark Tongue: “Write or right/correct the math . . . write or right/correct everything your eyes foresee.” I.e. possibly, “Fix/change our fate.”
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CHAPTER 1
Caliph Howl carried a thin paper-wrapped package across the well-tended lawns of the High College. Today was the day of his revenge.
Tattered shadows slid back and forth under a canopy of danson trees. The old stone buildings of Desdae warmed themselves in the sun like ancient mythic things, encrusted with gargoyles and piled with crippling tons of angled slate. Thirty of the buildings belonged to the township. The other eighteen belonged to the college. Two camps with an uneasy truce watched each other across the lake that separated them; collectively known by one name, Desdae: the gray hamlet of higher learning that crouched at the foothills of the mighty Healean Range.
Behind the campus’ thick walls, Caliph knew theory-haunted professors wasted away, frisking books for answers, winnowing grains of truth, pulling secrets like teeth from deep esoteric sockets. This was a quiet war zone where holomorphs and panomancers cast desperately for new ideas, compiling research with frenetic precision.
Desdae might be far away from the mechanized grit of cities like Isca, it might be quiet and sullen, but it wasn’t simple. It had small-town villains and small-town gossip and, he thought, small-town skullduggery as well.
Caliph tugged the library’s massive door and cracked the seal on the tomblike aromas: dust, buttery wood polish and ancient books.
He scanned for the librarian and slunk smoothly into the aisles.
The system that organized the library was like most other products of northern bureaucracy: a premeditated torture inflicted by the personal preferences of the man in charge. The system required students to memorize the stone busts of dead scholars, thereby reinforcing the school motto, “Truth, Light, Chastity and [especially] Hard Work.” The busts marked ogive-shaped burrows into labyrinthine stacks where freshmen soon learned to associate topic and location with the scholar representing a given area of study. Those who didn’t, doomed themselves to hours of wandering.
Caliph knew almost all two hundred sixty-three stone heads’ names and birth dates as if they had been
