Suddenly Caliph wasn’t alone in the house on Isca Hill. Someone else had been there, with him, seen things, dreamt terrifying dreams. “Tell me what you dreamt.”
Cameron didn’t answer right away and when he did, he took the long way. The slow way. The same way he must have come to Stonehold, with every word prepared.
“I’ll get to that. First let me tell you about your uncle.”
“Filling in holes—”
Cameron nodded. “Nathaniel planned his ascension to the High King’s throne for a reason I still don’t fully understand. Something more than simple ego . . . more than power. He was almost successful at doing something I think might have sealed the Duchy’s fate.
“At seventy-three years, most of his life had been spent in preparation.
“He was born in Stonehold. Left his family in the Duchy and traveled to Greymoor to study. After his graduation, he made a solitary trip to Twyrloch and when he came back—alone and nearly dead—he was carrying a book.
“Apparently its latch required a loathsome bargain to unlock. He had just accepted a position as professor at the High College when he took a sudden leave of absence.
“He traveled back to Stonehold. Lived in the house on Isca Hill while his sister’s family went away on holiday to the south.
“While they were gone he charmed a girl. Told her the house was his.
“He used her blood to open a holomorphic lock on the tome.”
Caliph blanched. “How do you know this? It doesn’t sound like something you read in a book.”
“Because he told me. He bragged about it. The old man was a letch. Anyway, after that, he said he went back to the High College and contented himself to study—for a time.
“Seems the older he grew, the more frenetic he became. Sensed his time was running out. He took sabbatical in the west-most hills of Stonehold, following a wisp of legend.
“He found something in the hills. In the mountains around the Lost Dale. Something he jotted in his notes. Notes I saw while I lived at the house.
“Something about the Navels of the World.
“It was a place he could go. A place that would let him live until Yacob’s Roll ran out. But it was also hidden. Cut off. Nathaniel could never hope to access it. It was a place he would have to commit murder to enter. Someplace close at hand.”
Caliph looked around. “You mean here? In the castle?”
“I think so. I believe that’s why he needed to be king. And so his real plot began. Over the course of two decades, through poison and holomorphy, he eliminated his own kin to the point that he alone stood in line for the High King’s throne.
“But too much coincidence would damn him from the crown. So Nathaniel devised another way. A special way to kill the king.”
Caliph hadn’t touched his wine. He leaned forward, eager to hear more.
Instead, Cameron handed Caliph a piece of paper.
Caliph took it and unfolded it, not understanding what it could be. On the page was Jacob’s handwriting. He read it quickly, twice. One section jumped out of the page.
“ ‘No one will recognize you’?” asked Caliph. A picture was beginning to form.
“I was tricked in the snow. A bad storm. The High King was on maneuvers in the Fort Line. Nathaniel must have had it planned.” Cameron’s eyes were haunted. “The royal guards weren’t in uniform. Bundled up against the snow. I thought they were bandits.”
“But how?”
“I don’t know. Mathematics. Twisted possibilities and time. Your uncle was an exceptional holomorph. Which brings me to the final truth. The reason you’ll think I’m crazy.”
Caliph waited patiently for the secret to be revealed.
“You remember Marco?”
Caliph’s throat tightened on the name. All he could do was nod.
Cameron’s broad shoulders quivered slightly as he spoke. The muscles in his face strained to control an involuntary spasm in his jaw. “I do too. One night.” He shook his head. “The sooty darkness covering the floor. I listened like a child for whatever woke me.
“Everything was silent. Everything was still and cold. I remember I looked out into the hall first. Through my bedroom door there was a lone candle. Deformed and melting.
“I listened to the absence of noise. Turned my head slowly, sensing something there. Watching me. Something soundless. Without the noise of breathing.
“That’s when I saw it. In the smudgy purple of my own room, the thing in the darkness.”
Cameron paused, apparently horrified at his own words. Eventually he forged on.
“His face was white, like wax—hanging eight feet off the floor. A black brimmed hat hid his eyes. But it was the grin I remember most! Fierce. Predatory. Laying bare a set of teeth. Interlocking canines that seemed to laugh without noise.
“Then it fell backward, the whole phantom, like an anchor, vanishing into the shadows at the corner of the room. It made the drapery ebb like ink.
“I’ve cried for you, Caliph, when I’ve thought about you, rocked in your cradle by that man. Sung holomorphic lullabies by the necromancer on Isca Hill. His rhymes struggled from your nursery on their own, made nightmares lurch around the yard.
“You asked me which High King I served. I served King Raymond VII.”
Caliph sank deeper into a numbing chill. “But. That. Was . . . 1397.”
“The highest form of holomorphy charged the house on Isca Hill. So high that no one, not even the Shr
dnae Sisterhood, dared to move against him. I am a product of Nathaniel’s art.”
Caliph shook his head.
“I’m the figure box in math books that can be drawn but not built. Nathaniel built me. The capstone of his achievement. The success story that followed his failure with Marco Howl’s ancient, mutant corpse. He needed someone good with a blade. Someone who could cut through a group of the king’s high guard. He found me in the pages of his own genealogy, brought me back to become a nameless, faceless assassin.
“And you are something like my great, great, great, great grandnephew: Caliph Howl.”
Caliph sat in a stupor. The winter morning they had left for Greymoor snapped back to him with clarity now.
