Sena nodded. She knew exactly where he meant. Caliph shoved several bricks against the bottom of the door then raced up the tower steps and pushed their way through the trapdoor into the onetime bedchamber of Nathaniel Howl.
The walls of the tower still held their strange geometry. They had been carved with sigils and glyphs that plaited and interlaced, surging generally upward like rushing voices frozen in stone.
A bedroll lay along the far wall. Aside from it, and the carvings in the ceiling, the room looked empty and remarkably clean.
“So this is where you stayed?” Caliph surmised, limping to one of the windows and trying to peer down at the dark yard. “After you disappeared?”
Sena sniffed and blew her nose in a handkerchief for an answer. She had a hundred lies in her head, but none of them would have worked. Anyway, she was too out of breath to lie. Instead she latched the trapdoor and walked over to the bedroll where she sat down and drew her knees up to her chin.
Caliph was fiddling with the window.
“I have to give you credit,” he said. “I don’t think I could have stood sleeping up here even one night.” He got the window open and the room became colder.
“What are you doing?”
For a reply he swung his leg over the sill. The tower had been built of stone and square holes set at intervals down the outside wall formed an invisible ladder that descended to the roof.
Caliph’s bandaged foot tapped gently until he found one of them. As impractical as it seemed, Nathaniel’s bedroom escape route finally found a purpose.
“Don’t worry,” Caliph said. “Whatever is down there won’t be making it inside.”
Sena stood up, her curiosity forcing her to follow.
“What did you do? I’ve never heard a formula like that.”
“Something my beneficent uncle taught me.”
Sena swung her legs out the window and sat on the sill looking down at him.
“How old were you?” she asked.
“Probably seven.”
His hands and feet worked the stones in a backward rhythm until he reached the roof. He waited until Sena found her footings. Once she had gotten halfway down he set off between the gables, sidestepping toward the edge of the roof to have a look at what might be prowling in the yard. He could see the lights of Isca from here.
Sena reached the roof and went to stand beside him.
“You seem to be getting around all right.”
Caliph smiled faintly.
She decided not to follow him.
“The shingles look rotten. Be careful.” Then her face went white.
Both of them stopped.
The creature was right below the eave. Its bestial breathing snorted from the bushes. Caliph got down on his knees and put his head out over the edge. The sight made him draw back quickly.
“It’s enormously tall,” he said. “Small head. Could almost reach the second-story windows.”
It had been gibbering quietly to itself. But it must have seen Caliph because suddenly a scream burst loose from its great rib cage and shivered the air.
The sound, so close beneath their feet, made Sena convulse. She scooted backward toward the peak.
“It might actually be able to do it with those arms,” Caliph whispered. He scrambled after her, heading back to the tower.
Agitated by its unreachable prey, it now sounded like the thing was running in circles around the house, cackling and crashing through the brambles, dragging its long talons over the walls.
When they had hauled themselves back inside, Sena went directly to the bedroll and sat down. Caliph shut the window and came over beside her.
“It’s amazing that something like that actually lives out in the mountains.”
The creature brought back blobby memories of his uncle muttering incoherently. The old man would stand at the window in his scholar robe, white haired, mumbling into his fingertips as he scanned the mountain woods for shapes that moved between the limbs. Caliph had already begun formulating plans to hunt it down and kill it.
“It’s unreal.”
“It’s very real,” Sena whispered. “It’s one of them.”
Though she said more than she wanted to, her currently jumbled sense of reality made it mercifully incoherent.
All she could remember was that same scream echoing in the mausoleum as she had unlocked the 
srym T
“What do you mean?” Caliph asked.
“I opened your uncle’s book,” she said quietly. “I lied and they know it.”
“They? Who’s they?” It was Caliph’s turn to watch Sena come apart the way she had watched him in the graveyard.
“The Yllo’tharnah,” she barely whispered.
“The what?”
She felt certain the creature had come for her, drawn by the book.
Outside, the monster let loose a horrid chilling shriek followed by a cackle that freshened her reserves of fear.
“See,” Sena licked her lips and continued to whisper, “that’s why I needed you . . . to open the book. Only I didn’t love you in time.”
Her smile looked crazy. It crossed the borders of sanity. Took on a reckless look—one that didn’t care anymore, one that laughed at virtually everything.
Her expression frightened Caliph more than the creature clawing at the walls.
She stood up suddenly, smiling, her intentions all too clear. She headed for the stairs.
“Sena, sit down.” He grappled her to the floor.
“Yeah. Fuck me,” she whispered. Her hands fumbled with his belt. “It’s what I do best.”
Her breath smelled like brandy but Caliph knew she wasn’t drunk. Her mouth went wild.
Caliph pinned her to the floor for her own protection. He refused to move. She changed personality again, screamed at him, kicked and fought, but he locked himself over her like a cage. She imagined him one of the crumbling stone guardians in Sandren.
In the end she stopped cursing and grew still.
“I hate you,” she whispered. “I hate your damned logical mind.”
An hour later she slept.
Caliph did not.
An inhuman gibbering noise came from the window and he saw her turn fitfully in her sleep.
Far away in Isca, Caliph heard an alarm horn sound. Its blare floated into the foothills and the creature outside grew quiet. More horns took up the note and carried it far above the blackness.
The High King had turned up missing.
CHAPTER 37
Sena woke quietly.
Her lids flicked open to see Caliph staring at her. He sat across the comfortless room with his arms resting on his knees. A band of light from the window marked his face like a welt.
“Didn’t you sleep?” she asked.
“It stopped making noise a few hours before dawn.”
Sena sat up. “I’m cold. Come warm me up.”
