Caliph sat down.
“We’ve questioned every one of them. They don’t know where the bodies came from. All of them say they were following strict orders from high command at the Glossok Warehouses. Does that mean anything to you?”
Caliph sat by himself in the royal study. He had asked Yrisl for a moment alone. Intelligence had come out of Miskatoll that Saergaeth planned to issue a final ultimatum, demanding the High King relinquish his throne. He would give a deadline and then . . .
Caliph listened to the sounds of the city coming through his window. Sigmund had lied. Or someone had lied. Those canisters of solvitriol suspensate hadn’t come from cats. They were human souls. Boys and girls. Gang members from the back alleys of Thief Town. Eventually he would get to the bottom of the deception. Eventually somebody, maybe even the High King himself, would have to pay. But for now, for this moment, Isca City and the entire Duchy of Stonehold was hanging by a thread.
Solvitriol power was the only thing that could save it. Solvitriol bombs. From the seedy underbelly, from violence and trash, Isca’s worm gangs had become martyrs and heroes in his eyes, an integral part of Isca’s defense.
He would go to Glossok. He would curse and tear Sigmund’s office to pieces if he had to in order to sort this murderous debacle out. He would sentence good old Sig to death and hang himself in chains from West Gate if he had to. But not now. Not now. The gears were in motion, his war plan already underway.
It was cruel. He agreed. It was drop-dead fucking evil and wrong. And he knew he was headed for even more lost sleep because of it. But there was nothing else to do. The last thing he could do now was stop. If it was true, if murdered street youths had been Sigmund’s ingredients for bombs, by the gods of Incense Street, he had to use them to save Isca. He wouldn’t allow their sacrifice to go to waste. He would use them to save the Duchy from itself.
Caliph opened the door and let the Blue General back in. “Yrisl,” he said quietly, “there are some things you need to know.”
CHAPTER 30
Sena stood determinedly in Nathaniel Howl’s ruined estate.
She let one of the dark sweets she had confected melt in her mouth. The rest she arranged in a wooden bowl, ready to be offered prosaically as she did every year to creatures crawling out of quixotic, asomatous darkness.
She had been part of the Sisterhood too long to put away the rites. There were numbers, there were powers in the motions of the seasons. Primitive articulations in some ways transcended the grinding industrial might of the current age. She whispered to the 
and placed the bowl in a clutch of bushes whose branches shook with a sudden gust of wind.
While buying ingredients earlier that day, she had heard about a creature in the foothills.
Farmers claimed it had snatched up dozens of chickens and other sorts of livestock. They said strange patterns showed up in the stains it left behind.
Two children—a boy and a girl—had gone missing.
Sena picked up her candle lantern and stepped back into the foyer of the Howl mansion, shutting the door Caliph had broken as best she could.
The ingredients and the kettles had taken their toll on her purse. She sat down at the kitchen table where she had cleared a little circle amid the refuse, freeing it from dust and webs. She spilled three gold gryphs and several silver beks from a clutch and let them roll around the tabletop. They were all she had, all that she could find in the bedroom before she left.
It made her laugh. A slightly crazy lost giggle that echoed off the decayed walls. She held her head in her hands and shivered. For a moment she thought about the High King’s featherbed.
The nights were cooling.
She stared at the coins—more than enough to pay the sexton off.
He was a huge creature that barely spoke Trade and gouged sentences out of Hinter like a three-year-old fumbling at clay. She had met him a week ago while gathering stones.
He did not know she was the High King’s witch.
Sena swept the coins back into the pouch and listened to the creatures twittering in the rubbish piles.
It must be nearly time, she thought. She checked her watch. She could hear bells ringing in the city, tolls like ghosts floating on the wind. Outside, the untrimmed bushes scrabbled at the windows, hungry for more sweets.
Sena stood up. Through one of the dirty windowpanes she had seen a lantern bobbing in the yard.
She wiped her hands on a damp rag and darted up a set of creaking stairs to one of the web-choked towers where she kept her things. With her pack over her shoulder, she ran back down to the foyer and outside where the smell of dying weeds met her.
The sexton was poking around at the edge of the estate. Sena sprinted toward him amidst the roar of leaves.
The sexton looked up.
“Moon’s greetin’,” he called. His voice seemed to come out of a cave. When Sena reached him, he offered her his huge gaunt hand, either to shake or to assist her in walking.
Sena dropped a silver coin in the cavernous palm and pretended to misunderstand the gesture.
“Do you think it will storm?” It was a moronic question she asked to fill up space.
He swung his head. “Mubee few drops.”
Everything about him was enormous. Even his nose. Blade-like, hooked and thin. Long unkempt hair hung to his shoulders in straight uneven lengths almost too heavy for the wind. Instead of eyes, his face held tiny sunken points of obscurity.
Like a scarecrow, he towered over her, emanating an unsettling darkness from his pores.
“I been here once before,” he said. “Boneyard’s uver ther, ain’t it?” He pointed with his spade, shouting hard above the wind.
Another sudden gust ravished the trees and a storm of plundered leaves flapped crazily into his lantern light.
Sena nodded. She led the way, picking a route through the old forest.
As they went, voices floated up from the crofts below. Faraway shouts about closing barn doors and getting livestock inside. Disembodied and broken up over the distance, they sounded like the shades of men and women mumbling near fields they once farmed.
When Sena came to the place marked with white stones the sexton stopped and lifted the spade off his shoulders. He swung it down into both hands.
“Wait,” said Sena.
A huge leathery leaf slapped her in the face. She batted it away. “I need the doors opened.” She pointed up the hill.
The sexton scowled but shrugged. He plodded off through the burial grounds. Sena followed.
Strandy saplings had conquered most of the cemetery. The mausoleum doors glared from a disturbingly dark recess in the hillside where crisp beveled letters had been chiseled into an arch.
Oblivious to omens, the sexton put the haft of his spade through the chains that ran between the handles and cranked down. Though the spade gave a pained crack, the well-corroded links burst apart, falling with a dull clatter to the slab.
The slab was covered with leaves and maple seeds. The sexton sorted out the chains and tossed them heavily to one side like a man who had just killed a snake.
Hunched over, Sena thought the sexton might pass as the creature the farmers were talking about.
“Hab to dig curful now,” the sexton muttered to himself, “spade’s craked.” His lantern beamed fitfully. It cast a yellow circle across the slab and up the stone doors, making him look monstrous as he examined the damaged tool. He pulled one of the doors open but didn’t bother looking inside.
