“I wish you hadn’t done that,” Molly said. “Can you turn them off again? The purple ones, anyway, with the‌—‌with the legs, I guess.”

“No, I can’t,” Schmendrick answered crossly. “Be quiet. Where’s the skull?”

The Lady Amalthea could see it grinning from a pillar, lemon-small in the shadows and dim as the morning moon, but she said nothing. She had not spoken since she came down from the tower.

“There,” the magician said. He strode to the skull and peered into its split and crumbling eyesockets for a long time, nodding slowly and making solemn sounds to himself. Molly Grue stared with equal earnestness, but she glanced often at the Lady Amalthea. At last Schmendrick said, “All right. Don’t stand so close.”

“Are there really spells to make a skull speak?” Molly asked. The magician stretched out his fingers and gave her a small, competent smile.

“There are spells to make everything speak. The master wizards were great listeners, and they devised ways to charm all things of the world, living and dead, into talking to them. That is most of it, being a wizard‌—‌seeing and listening.” He drew a long breath, suddenly looking away and rubbing his hands together. “The rest is technique,” he said. “Well. Here we go.”

Abruptly he turned to face the skull, put one hand lightly on the pale crown, and addressed it in a deep, commanding voice. The words marched out of his mouth like soldiers, their steps echoing with power as they crossed the dark air, but the skull made no answer at all.

“I just wondered,” the magician said softly. He lifted his hand from the skull and spoke to it again. This time the sound of the spell was reasonable and cajoling, almost plaintive. The skull remained silent, but it seemed to Molly that a wakefulness slipped across the faceless front and was gone again.

In the scuttling light of the radiant vermin, the Lady Amalthea’s hair shone like a flower. Appearing neither interested nor indifferent, but quiet in the way that a battlefield is sometimes quiet, she watched as Schmendrick recited one incantation after another to a desert-colored knob of bone that spoke not one word more than she did. Each charm was uttered in a more despairing tone than the last, but the skull would not speak. And yet Molly Grue was certain that it was aware and listening, and amused. She knew the silence of mockery too well to mistake it for death.

The clock struck twenty-nine‌—‌at least, it was at that point that Molly lost count. The rusty strokes were still clanking to the floor when Schmendrick suddenly shook both fists at the skull and shouted, “All right, all right for you, you pretentious kneecap! How would you like a punch in the eye?” On the last words, his voice unraveled completely into a snarl of misery and rage.

“That’s right,” the skull said. “Yell. Wake up old Haggard.” Its own voice sounded like branches creaking and knocking together in the wind. “Yell louder,” it said. “The old man’s probably around here somewhere. He doesn’t sleep much.”