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 beensent 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