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 toput 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 meta-structure, 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