And an unlikely setting.

What strange architect had designed this place? Ajayi found herself wondering every so often. The castle, rising on a single outcrop of rock from the plain, was built very largely of books. The walls were mostly slate, apparently quite normal, grained rock produced by a perfectly standard physical process of alluvial deposition. But when you loosened one of the slate blocks from the castle walls - an easy job, as the castle was slowly crumbling away- and split it open, on every surface so exposed a series of cut or engraved figures was revealed, arranged in lines and columns, complete with word and line breaks and what looked like punctuation. Quiss had demolished a significant part of the castle when he first discovered this, unwilling to believe that the stones, every one of them, all the tens of thousands of cubic metres the castle must be composed of, all those kilotonnes of rock really were saturated, filled full of hidden, indecipherable lettering. The castle's stunted squad of masons and builders were still working to repair the damage the old man had done by tearing down walls in his attempt to prove these hidden glyphs were isolated aberrations, not - as they indeed were - ubiquitous. This caused much grumbling and complaining, as the masons considered they were anyway fighting a losing battle against the castle's accelerating decay without its guests adding to their workload.

"You called?" a small, cracked voice said. Ajayi looked up at the door to the winding-stair expecting to see an attendant, but the voice had come from behind her, and she could see Quiss's face starting to turn red, his eyes widening, the lines around them spreading out further.

"Fuck off!" he shouted over Ajayi's shoulder towards the balcony. The woman turned round and saw that the red crow was perched on the balustrade, flapping its wings like a man trying to keep warm and looking in at them, its head cocked to one side. An eye like a small black button glittered, fastening on them.