A shiver rushed up Nicodemus’s back. He needed to return to the Drum Tower.

The Index lay before him. Closing the book made the halo of purple sentences collapse back into its pages. After a long breath, he turned away and started for the door.

“Don’t you want the book?” a quick, squeaking voice said.

Nicodemus jumped back. “Who’s there?” He began to write a club of simple Magnus sentences in his biceps.

From the corner stepped a lanky gargoyle with a snow monkey’s body, a bat’s giant ears, and an owl’s bulging eyes. Nicodemus recognized the construct he had misspelled in the Stacks. “Gargoyle, did I meet you last night?”

“Petra,” she said, nodding vigorously. “Now I’m named Petra.” She grinned at him before scampering to the doorway. “Take the book. You misspelled it like me.”

“But the alarm spell will-”

“Alarm spell nothing.” The gargoyle peeled a chord of faint Numinous sentences from one side of the doorway. “Get the book and step under this.” She pulled the alarm spell free of the floor and held it up above her head.

Nicodemus stared at her for a moment, then fetched the Index. “But not even a grand wizard could move those sentences,” he said while ducking under the alarm.

She nodded and spoke rapidly. “Since you rewrote me, I can do things other constructs can’t. I can trade and bargain. I got these eyes from a night-watch gargoyle, the ears from a grunt who hunts mice. But I think I still only have secondary thoughts.” She looked up at him with childish curiosity. “What’s the difference between secondary and tertiary cognition?”

He grimaced. “Secondary constructs can’t remember anything about mortality. The academy claims they’re not fully sentient, so it’s not immoral to deconstruct them.”

The gargoyle started. One of her batlike ears flicked away and then back. “Mortality?”

Nicodemus nodded. “As in death. Secondary constructs can’t remember what it means to die.”

“But I think I still only have secondary thoughts. What is the difference between secondary and tertiary cognition?” Her tone was the same tone as before.

Nicodemus hugged the Index to his chest. “I’m sorry, Petra. I don’t know how to tell you.”

The gargoyle didn’t seem to be listening; her ears were flicking about in different directions. “You should go!” she whispered. “I see and hear many things now. There are corrupt gargoyles now. We constructs are all talking about them. No one knows who’s written them. They’re spying on the wizards.”

Nicodemus swallowed. “What about the gargoyles in the compluvium?”

“They’re uncorrupted,” she said. “You should leave this place now. Something bad is near.”

“Thank you, Petra,” he said and turned away.

She laughed and called after him, “Thank you, Nicodemus Weal. You are my author who made me my own author.”

Unsure of what to say, Nicodemus hurried away though the library’s cavernous center. A thousand thoughts raced through his mind. But when he stepped through the main entrance into the Women’s Atrium a realization made him stop.

“Los damn it!” he swore. Because the Index was misspelled, so might be his understanding of Shannon’s text. There was no telling if he could produce a functional respell. Fear tightened his throat. Writing this attack spell might even be dangerous.

He started to curse his cacography but then thought of Petra the gargoyle. It took him a moment to identify the warm feeling in his chest as pride-he hadn’t felt that for a long time.

He drew in a deep breath and looked up at the atrium’s ceiling. The mosaic of Uriel Bolide looked back at him. With her left hand, Bolide was pointing a red wand at a scroll she held in her right. Chips of amber had been used to depict her celebrated long hair.

Her smile was amused, as if she had just discovered the properties of magical advantage by applying a little femininity to a problem that had confounded the then all-male wizards.

Nicodemus was struck by how strongly the woman in the mosaic resembled April. In the nightmare, April’s image had stretched above him and her hair had become trains of stars. “Fly from Starhaven!” she had said. “Fly with anything you have!”

Again Nicodemus hugged the Index to his chest. It was all he had.

His steps quickened until he was sprinting across the Stone Court. In a few hours someone would notice the missing Index. Before that happened, he had to hide all of the male cacographers in the compluvium.

CHAPTER Twenty-seven

On his way up the stairwell, Nicodemus found the Drum Tower silent. He burst into the common room. A chair tried to bite his hip and was knocked flat for its trouble. “John!” he called. “John, wake up! We need to leave.”

He rushed into his chamber and threw open the chest at the foot of his bed. With focused urgency, he pulled his winter cloak around his shoulders and then spread a blanket on the floor. On top of it he put the Index, the coin purse Shannon had given him, and a few spare clothes.

His belt-purse lay on the foot of his sleeping cot. When he grabbed it, his fingers began to tingle. He frowned at first but then remembered the druidic artifact-the wooden sphere encircled by a root-that Deirdre had given him.

The Seed of Finding. He put the druidic artifact on the blanket. He might need that.

After scooping up the blanket and twisting it into a makeshift satchel, he ran into the common room.

“Simple John?” Simple John asked from his doorway. The big man’s candle filled the room with flickering light and long shadows.

“Everything’s all right, John,” Nicodemus said. “But I need your help gathering all our boys. Has Devin come back from her night-time janitorial?”

“No,” the big man said, eyes wide. “No!”

“John, look at me. Something bad has happened. You and I must take all the Drum Tower boys up to the compluvium. We’ll be safe there. And if we’re not, there’s a way we can leave Starhaven altogether.”

The other man shook his head. “No!”

Nicodemus cursed himself. “John, I didn’t mean to upset you. Everything’s going to be fine. But we must go quickly. Get anything you might need out of your room. Warm clothes especially.” Nicodemus moved for the door. “I’ll wake the boys.”

John stepped in front of him. “No!” he again declared, his bulky frame blocking the door.

“John, we have to do this. It’s not safe to stay.” John shook his head. When Nicodemus tried to move past him, John pushed him back with enough force to make him stumble.

“John, listen to me!” Nicodemus said, setting down his makeshift satchel. “We must get the boys to safety.”

This set the big man’s head shaking again.

Nicodemus began to write common language sentences along each of his fingers. Against a normal spellwright, Nicodemus’s disability would have rendered him helpless. But now, facing another cacographer, he could use sentences simple enough for him to avoid misspelling. Simple John wouldn’t be able to edit or disspell them.

“I’m sorry I have to do this,” he said, flicking his hands open and casting glowing white sentences to wrap around John’s arms and legs.

The big man’s candle fell to the floor and winked out. Fortunately, the white glow from Nicodemus’s spells and the moonlight pouring through the windows provided sufficient light.

In an attempt to edit the spells binding his arms, John cast a green sentence from his chin. Nicodemus caught and destroyed it with a disspell. John tried twice more, spitting out the spells like angry words. Even so, he was too slow. Nicodemus censored each sentence with a finger-flicked disspell.

Seeming to realize that he could not compete with Nicodemus magically, John began to flex his massive arms. Two of the binding spells snapped. But even as the big man broke a third line, Nicodemus sent ten more glowing-white sentences, and then ten more.