Six of Starhaven’s twenty eastern towers held the Sataal Landing more than four hundred feet above ground. Nicodemus tried not to think about the height as he walked eastward along the thin stone concourse. Every fifty feet or so, he climbed a few broad steps to the next plaza.
The surrounding towers and nearby mountains blocked direct sunlight from the landing for all but a few hours during the day. The Chthonics had once cultivated a shade garden here. Antiquarians wrote of tall mountain laurels and soil beds bursting with angel wings, fetterbush, and barronwort.
Now the soil beds nurtured only weeds and ivy. Moss bristled between the wall stones. Feral cats skulked about the place looking for fresh water. Nicodemus couldn’t see anyone following him but guessed a subtextualized sentinel was near.
As he ventured farther east, the towers crowded closer. At each new level, the plaza was smaller, the stairway narrower.
Finally the landing terminated in a small, mossy cloister. Nicodemus found his way blocked by the thirty-foot wall that ran between the abandoned Itan and Karkin Towers. A row of metal rungs climbed halfway up the wall to a narrow walkway. Voices echoed from above.
Nicodemus scaled the ladder and found its rungs spaced too closely for human comfort. The Chthonics must have had small hands, he decided. Or maybe small claws? Or perhaps they had had no claws or hands at all but had gripped the rungs with their teeth.
On top of the walkway stood a smiling Magister Shannon with Azure on his shoulder. The old man was cheerfully lecturing four Northern sentinels: “… obvious reasons the compluvium’s constructs are written aggressively. So we mustn’t-ah, Nicodemus, you’re here at last.”
The sentinels, three men, one woman, all were roughly sixty years in age and wearing gold or silver buttons on their sleeves. They examined Nicodemus with narrowed eyes. Shannon laughingly introduced them as his personal guards.
Nicodemus bowed. He understood their confused looks. They had been sent to investigate Shannon and were taken aback by the old man’s enthusiasm. Nicodemus couldn’t blame them.
Shannon grabbed Nicodemus’s arm and pulled him through the crowd. The old wizard’s grip felt like a vise.
The walkway on which they were standing ran into a crevice where the Karkin Tower met the wall. Here a narrow staircase climbed to the wall’s top. A seven-foot-tall gargoyle stood guard on the bottommost step.
Its muscled body would have been humanoid, save for the two extra arms growing under the expected pair. And the stone wings bulging from its back would have resembled bird wings but for the two additional carpal joints that allowed the limbs to fold into tight, fiddlehead spirals. Its giant hawk’s head glared at the spellwrights with stony eyes.
Shannon was again lecturing the sentinels. “Those of you who’ve dealt with a war-weight gargoyle will remember that they are dangerous, valuable, and fractious. So use great care when presenting these passwords.” The old man produced a scroll from his sleeve and began pulling off Numinous paragraphs.
Nicodemus watched as Shannon handed a set of passwords to each sentinel. The Northerners, however, were studying the massive gargoyle and glancing at one another.
Suddenly Nicodemus realized that Shannon was allowing the golden paragraphs to fold into pleated and stacked sheets: this conformation stabilized much of its language but strained those sentences that folded the text. Such tension could cause rearrangement or fragmentation.
Sure enough, when Shannon handed a copy of the passwords to the female sentinel, two bending sentences snapped.
Nicodemus spoke up, “Magister, her text has-”
“Don’t worry, lad. I’ll take you through myself. Excuse me, spellwrights. My apprentice has not yet mastered Numinous.”
He grabbed Nicodemus again and dragged him to the massive gargoyle. Nicodemus’s stomach knotted until the old man released his arm and held out two password texts.
The gargoyle extended its four arms. Each pair of hands took a paragraph and began to fold them. If written correctly, the spells would fold into a pre-set shape.
When the aquiline gargoyle had creased each paragraph into a small starlike shape, it chirped and moved aside.
Shannon put a hand on Nicodemus’s back and guided him onto the stairway between the Karkin Tower and the wall.
Behind them, two sentinels held out their passwords to the gargoyle’s many arms.
“Be ready for anything,” Shannon muttered.
Confused, Nicodemus turned back just as the war-weight gargoyle began shrieking. Two bulky stone arms struck the wall with percussive force. A wing unfurled to block the passage.
A chorus of shocked sentinel voices came from the other side.
“Magisters,” Shannon scolded, “you let the passwords fragment! How could you be so careless with a pleated sheet? Check the other two paragraphs.”
An apologetic female voice replied that they too had deconstructed.
“Wonderful,” Shannon barked. “I can’t cast Numinous past this war-weight gargoyle without exciting it to violence.”
A dour male voice replied, “Magister, we’ve orders not to lose sight of you.”
Shannon laughed. “A fine job you’ve made of that. Now Nicodemus and I lack the protection we were promised. Burning heaven! I’ve a mind to complain to Amadi of this.”
The sentinels were silent.
Shannon instructed them to hurry down to the ground level and then hike back up the Itan Tower. From there they might reach the Spindle Bridge. He and Nicodemus would wait on the bridge. “Make it back in an hour and Amadi needn’t know,” he said and then turned to hike up the steps toward the top of the wall.
The sentinels set off in the opposite direction. Nicodemus hurried after the old man.
“Now we may speak freely,” Shannon said with satisfaction. “Even the subtextualized sentinel following you can’t get past that brute.”
Nicodemus frowned. “Magister, the passwords were misspelled?”
“Not in the least,” Shannon said, turning back long enough to wink a blind eye. “They couldn’t have been spelled more correctly.”
IN THE ITAN Tower, Deirdre laughed at what she saw through the window bars.
She was standing next to Kyran in an abandoned Chthonic hallway-a dark place with slate floors, cracked walls of deep-blue plaster, a black ceiling shaped like roots or rocks. Everything was coated with centuries of dust.
Bright autumn sunlight slanted in through the barred windows, illuminating clouds of languid dust motes. A hand moving through the chilly air spun a few bright specks; Kyran’s body pulled with it a maelstrom of flying, sunlit dirt.
“Shannon’s used the hawk-headed construct to fool the Northern wizards,” Deirdre said. “The simpletons are hurrying down toward the ground. Ky, go and follow them. I want to know if they report his trick.”
“I shouldn’t leave you.”
She turned to look at her protector. Though stooped and leaning on his thick walking staff, he still had to hold his head at an awkward angle to avoid the low ceiling. It made him seem like a giant.
“Are we having this argument again?” she asked, smiling. “You know I never lose.”
“Because you never argue about what matters.”
“Ky, this is not the time. I need you to watch those wizards.”
“There’s not another soul for a half mile. Even the black-robes don’t come here.”
Her smile wilted.
His dark eyes glared at her. Then, with a barely audible grunt, he nodded. One long stride brought him to the barred window. The sunlight turned his hair to gleaming gold, his robes to solar white. He watched the four sentinels hurrying down the stone platform, then turned and strode away down the hall, his walking staff clicking against the stone floor.
