into memory. For now, Caliph preferred to label it a trick or figment of the wind.
He left the monument and trudged uphill. A meadow above the Stones tossed mournfully, tumbled down from a small wood that Caliph recognized from Sena’s map. He scanned the trunks, looking for a trail and found one.
He checked his compass and gripped the paper, wading through the whipping weeds and into the wood. Giant drops were splattering everywhere, on boulders, bark and patches of stony dirt. The warm musty rain assaulted him like soft slimy food hurled in a theater.
Just ahead, a small cottage came into view and Caliph made a dash for it. Crimson flowers in a barrel drooped darkly by the door. A window had been left open and lace curtains slapped about like desperate fingers.
Caliph thumped hard only to have the door swing open under his blows.
He fumbled into a broad kitchen, pungent with spice and tried to shut the door but the latch seemed broken. He set his pack on the table and slammed the sash on the moaning window.
Caliph wiped water from his face and began winding the thermal crank. After the dials started glowing, he clicked a chemiostatic lantern and held it up to examine the room.
Delicate chairs and copper kettles poised like swans. A pair of tall soft boots sat crumpled by the door. The cottage smelled of her, but in a dusty faint way. Panning the lantern, he could see that the floor by the window had been ruined by weather.
“Sena?”
His voice, coinciding with a blast of wind, seemed to rattle the leaded glass. The cottage was tiny. A brown tailless cat blinked at him from the stairs, but there was something else, something dark and somber on the floor.
Grume streaked the floorboards, rusty and dry. Caliph found more at the threshold. He backed into the kitchen, feeling the warmth drain from his face.
Caliph reexamined the front door. The lock had been broken, but the bolt had splintered the frame as though hit from the inside.
Caliph shook off his queasiness. There was no body. He poked his face above the second floor and peered at Sena’s bedroom, noting the carved headboards. Maybe she’d made it to a hospital in Sandren. Maybe the blood wasn’t hers.
A deafening crack of thunder split the air just the other side of the roof. Caliph’s body hair prickled.
The sound of torrential rain on the vague and somehow unsettling geometry of the windows lessened.
He panned the lantern, scanning the room. His name leapt out from a corkboard in the kitchen. Plucking the pushpin, he quickly read the note:
Caliph:
Currently, hospitals employ cytoclastic kymographs. Unless new doctors emerge, redundant therapy heightens egregious symptoms, taking all intrinsic remedies south . . .
The old game. C-urrently, h-ospitals e-mploy c-ytoclastic k-ymographs . . . check under the stairs. He spun immediately, took two steps forward and knelt down.
A small latch had been cleverly hidden at the corner of the first step. Caliph unhooked it and a crack appeared along the baseboard. He raised his eyebrows, gripped the lip of the bottom step and stood up. The entire staircase rose smoothly into the air like the lid of a counter-weighted trunk. Underneath, a second set of steps descended into a narrow pit lined with mortared stones. He felt immediately apprehensive about what he might find.
The chemiostatic light spilled like old wash water down the secret steps; it picked out the silver glints of bottles and flasks from the cellar gloom. Caliph swung the hood around and the light lapped over a bookcase filled with volumes, a table cluttered with powders, charcoal drawing sticks and dried roots.
“Witch.”
The word came softly to his lips.
Upstairs, the hinges on the kitchen door creaked in the wind. Caliph paused, listening, but nothing stirred. When he turned his attention back to the table of powdered roots, he noticed The Fall of Bendain sitting in the middle of the workspace with a fingerprint inked in blood in the center of its cover.
It wasn’t the real thing. She had asked for his forgery of The Fall of Bendain after Roric had left school.
He picked it up. The blood stopped here. There was a bookmark. He opened to it and discovered that it was actually a note addressed to him.
He scowled. It was dated nearly a year ago and everything about it was wrong.
Tes 13, Year of the Search
Caliph,
I’m not paranoid, really. This is just in case something goes wrong, which of course it won’t because if it