“May I go now?” the boy asked glumly.
Nicodemus nodded. “Yes, yes. Catch up with your classmates. You don’t have to mention this conversation. If the preceptor asks, tell him I scolded you for being disrespectful.” He smiled at the boy.
Without a word, Derrick leaped up from his seat and hurried away.
Nicodemus yawned again and sat for a moment with his elbows on the desk, resting his exhausted head. He was about to stand when a sound made him look up toward the door.
He expected to see more evidence of subtextualized sentinels. Instead he saw that Derrick hadn’t left but was standing in the threshold.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“No,” the boy said, looking Nicodemus in the eye for the first time. “But… thank you, Magister.”
CHAPTER Fourteen
When Deirdre regained consciousness, she was lying on the floor, crying.
Kyran knelt beside her, running his hands through her hair and telling her that everything would be all right.
Above him stretched a blank stone ceiling. They were back in their Starhaven quarters.
Slowly her eyes dried. “What happened?” she asked. Her stomach ached and her mouth and throat burned.
“We were subtextualized and spying on the boy’s lesson when another subtexualized spellwright, most likely Amadi Okeke, arrived,” Kyran rumbled. “You fell into a seizure and I carried you here.”
She sat up. “Did the sentinel detect us?”
He shook his head.
“And do the other druids suspect anything?”
Again a head shake.
“Thank Bridget and Boann both,” she mumbled while wiping her mouth. The back of her hand came away covered with soggy bits of bread.
She looked at her protector.
“Vomit. Came up when you were seizing. You inhaled some of it. I had texts on hand to clear your lungs. But I can’t promise your safety if the fits grow worse.”
“Such is the divine illness,” Deirdre said, staring at the filth. “It is the goddess’s will.”
He sniffed. “Is it the goddess’s will that you should die?”
“Fitting punishment for what I did.”
Kyran’s hand appeared under her chin and turned her face to his. “For what we did.”
She looked away. “Ky, let’s not argue again about if I’m a fool or if you’re a fool or…”
He pulled her close. He had undone the wooden buttons of his sleeve to expose his arms for spellwriting, and now she pressed her cheek against his bare skin.
“Ky, I don’t know who I am,” she mumbled into his shoulder. “When I was seizing this time, I had horrible visions. I was standing on the banks of a Highland river when this wolf with a man’s head and red eyes jumped on me. And somehow I was stabbed again and again. I melted like oil and went flowing down the river.”
With gentle hands, Kyran smoothed her hair until she was calm again.
They both stood, he favoring his left leg as always. After a tremulous sigh, Deirdre looked around their austere room: a chest, a washstand, a chamber pot, two beds, Kyran’s oak walking staff leaning against the wall by the door.
She sat down by her pillow.
As Kyran joined her, a rat scurried within a nearby wall. “Tell me of your interview with the boy before he taught,” Kyran said while handing her a clean tunic.
“Frustrating.” She wiped her face. “He’s frightened and resists manipulation. Likely he’ll tell Shannon. But at least he understood what I said. It’s a seed that will grow later.”
Kyran’s eyes narrowed. “Grow when?”
She sighed. “The demon-worshiper who cursed him can’t be far. I don’t like it, but when the fighting starts he’ll see that I was telling the truth.”
Kyran shook his head and began to button up his sleeves. “You’re courting battle with a demon-worshiper merely to manipulate this boy?”
“I court nothing.” She stood. “I’d rather smuggle the boy from the fastness tonight, but he’s too frightened by his disability to leave his life here.” She began to pace. “Don’t look at me like that, Ky. A clash would be good for him. It will strengthen him for the coming struggles.”
“It might do that,” Kyran agreed. “Or it might kill him.”
AS SHANNON LABORED up steps of the Alacran Tower, Azure gazed through the stairwell’s geometric window screens. Outside lay Starhaven’s northwest quarter. Its many Spirish towers boasted pyriform brass domes. They stood as bold intermediates to the gray Lornish steeples to the south and the white hemispheres that topped the towers in the northeastern Imperial Quarter.
At times, Azure could glimpse the Bolide Garden far below. At this height, it seemed only a small brown square. Last summer Shannon had taken new quarters overlooking the garden. Ongoing renovations had filled the place with stone heaps and dirt piles.
Inside the stairwell, Azure examined the indigo wall tiles and the ceiling’s geometric mosaics.
Shannon, however, couldn’t appreciate what his familiar saw. He was too busy wondering if he had successfully covered his tracks. Earlier, while pretending to research several gargoyles, he had used a knifelike spell to cut into their executive texts. That done, he had written into the constructs memories of talking to him until an hour past midday. Then had come the task of eluding the sentinels Amadi had sent to guard him. Hopefully the two fools were still waiting for him to come out of a privy in the Marfil Tower.
Abruptly, a narrow hallway branched off to the right. When Shannon stopped to regain his breath, Azure wrote teasingly about his age and weakening legs. Shannon affected fatigue and dropped his shoulder so quickly the parrot was left flapping and dashing off laughing accusations of betrayal.
After Azure glanced up and down the stairwell, Shannon crept down the dark hallway and up a ladder to a small metal door. For centuries, Starhaven’s janitorial records had listed the door as broken: “Corrupted tumbler spell: unfrangible.” Janitorial saw no need to fix the door; it opened onto an insignificant gargoyle perch that overlooked the northern walls.
In truth, the door and the landing beyond were the fiercely guarded secret of Ejindu’s Sons-a political faction to which Shannon had once belonged.
Azure bobbed her head. She didn’t like the dark, claustrophobic space.
“A moment longer, old friend,” Shannon cooed while flicking a glowing mass of Numinous passwords into the door’s lock. It sprang open with an iron shriek.
Shannon carefully stepped out onto a narrow landing and beheld the bright landscape. To his left lay the vast, grassy coastal plain. Before him the western slopes of the Pinnacle Mountains stretched away to the horizon. Green alpine forests, spotted with scarlet or gold aspen thickets, covered the steep slopes.
He could make out the skeletons of several dead trees. It made him think of what Deirdre had said about the Silent Blight and trees dying across the continent.
A chill wind tugged at Shannon’s robes and set Azure flapping to keep her balance.
The landing itself was a narrow slab of gray stone surrounded by a crenellated barricade. To the right of the door, inside a small stone nook, slept an eyeless gargoyle with a bat’s face and a pudgy infant’s body. Shannon shook its shoulder.
The spell woke with a twitch. “My father has no ears,” it croaked. “My father taught me to hear. My father has no eyes; he taught me to see. My father is covered with cowhide.”
“Construct, you were fathered from a spellbook,” Shannon answered the verification riddle. “And my wisdom was fathered from a codex of Ejindu’s teachings. My name is Agwu Shannon.”
The gargoyle reached under its feet, into a stone recess that held its white-marble eyes. Other, heavier
