“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.

Deirdre looked out the window again. Shannon and Nicodemus were hiking up the steep stairway between the wall and the tower. She would need to climb up a few more floors to keep them in view. She set off in the opposite direction from Kyran.

For once, Deirdre was not irritated by her short stature. She did not need to stoop when stepping through the Chthonic doorways, nor did her small feet slip on the short steps.

A cloud of pigeons shot past a nearby window. Deirdre found herself thinking about Shannon. Was Nicodemus’s trust in the old wizard well placed? Dare she approach him?

Because she was preoccupied with these questions, it wasn’t until she had completed a circuit around the tower, and so climbed to the next level, that she noticed the footsteps.

She stopped near the top of the staircase. The footsteps ceased as well. “Ky,” she called, “you’re to follow the sentinels, not follow me around like a mother hen.”

At first silence greeted her words. But then the footsteps returned at a sprint.

Deirdre’s heart began to pound. The wizards had not allowed her to wear a blade. Instinctively, her eyes searched about for a weapon and fell on the horizontal bars the Chthonics had built into their windows. She rushed over and grabbed two rods that had been drilled into the window frame.

No living man could have pulled them free. But Deirdre needed only to put one foot on the wall and heave. The bars exploded from the frame with small clouds of pulverized stone.

The footsteps were loud and echoing now. She crouched and held the two steel bars up in Spirish fighting fashion.

The figure that came running up the staircase wore a tattered white cloak-more a hastily sewn sheet than a proper garment. A voluminous hood covered his head and face.

As Deirdre raised her crude weapons, the creature ran through a square sunbeam. An object extending from his hand became a blazing rectangle of reflected light.

The glare momentarily dazzled her eyes, so it wasn’t until the creature was a few steps away that she identified the steel object as an ancient Lornish greatsword.

“LISTEN CAREFULLY,” SHANNON said, stepping onto the wall at the end of the Sataal Landing. “We don’t have much time.”

Azure was riding on the wizard’s shoulder and using her eyes to see for him.

“Of course, Magis-”

A few inches ahead, the wall plummeted roughly seventy feet to the shaded impluvium: a deep rainwater reservoir that provided water to Starhaven’s inhabited quarters through a series of aqueducts. Beneath the surface lay massive valves and floodgates. Around them moved what Nicodemus first took to be bulbous gray fish, but then he realized they were the water gargoyles that operated the valves.

Beyond the impluvium stretched a mile-wide half-bowl of roofs, gables, and gutters that funneled rain down to the reservoir. This metastructure, composed of the southeast quarter’s many different contiguous buildings, was known as the compluvium; and everywhere on it-squatting, stooping, or crawling-were the gutter gargoyles. The constructs were busy mucking leaves out of the aqueducts, scaring off birds, or mending leaky roofs.

“Amazing,” Nicodemus half-whispered.

“All of these gargoyles are controlled by a faction to which I once belonged,” Shannon explained, hurrying toward a spiral staircase on the wall’s opposite end. “If you or the Drum Tower is ever endangered, you must bring all the male cacographers here. That brute down by the Sataal Landing will obey your commands. You’re to bring the boys here to the compluvium and hide them; it’s a large place and the gargoyles know many secret nooks.”

Nicodemus swallowed. “Endangered by what? The murderer? The sentinels?”