The Last Page

Caliph sighed. His eyes made a circuit of the floor. He walked over to her.

“Feel how cold I am?”

Caliph nodded.

“How did you stay so warm?” She burrowed against him. A queer disavowal of the night before.

“We should get back,” Caliph said. He pushed her gently away, repulsed by her variance.

The whole way back to the city, Sena cracked brittle jokes while Caliph watched people flee Isca on tractors and steam cars piled with possessions. When Caliph didn’t respond she accused him of being grumpy.

He looked through her as though she were a curl of smoke from the farmsteads along the road. He saw behind her smile where men with enormous axes were herding furry pigs to slaughter.

A moment later a patrol of soldiers put an end to his self-absorbed metaphor and whisked the two of them back to Isca Castle.

After their return, Sena lost track of Caliph.

As often happened, he disappeared abruptly into the unremitting political cauldron that cooked the insides of Isca Castle.

But today’s level of activity was extreme even by wartime standards. More odd, it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the previous night.

Sena watched as men in suits ushered Caliph toward the epicenter of an administrative stew. For a moment they patted his back, asked briefly if all was right and then got down to the business of thrusting dossiers and charts into his vacant hands while yelping highlights above the chatter.

Sena could tell something had happened during their time in the hills. Maybe it was something to do with Saergaeth. She would find out eventually. In the meantime she was simply too tired to care.

Caliph hurried off, surrounded by advisors and bodyguards and a constant, migrainous din.

Sena took the stairs, ascending the city’s quintessential cupola, climbing wedges into the sky. She headed like a moth, despite her exhaustion, for the drab garret with the occult beacon no one else could see.

When she reached the room she stared out over the bleak mansions and hollow-eyed factories. The city was like one of the glyphs. So intricate, so vast in meaning. It seemed impossible to understand. She turned and looked at the book: red, fouled and indifferent.

She opened it. The cover folded back unhindered, mundanely submissive to her demands.

Her skin prickled like a weather prophet feeling electricity or something tighter than air. She gathered items: antiseptic, clean cloths, a bowl of water. Megan had given her the shylock two years ago as a contingency. In case she ever decided to carve her eyes. Sena found it at the bottom of her pack, tried it on, felt it move slightly like a leech adjusting its grip. It covered only her eyes.

She took it off and set it aside.

She opened a little wooden case. Inside was an instrument with chrome loops, opposable tunsia blades and an adjustable arm with a mirror the size of a coin. Sena looked into the tiny mirror where the dark scalpels hovered over her reflection.

Yella byn! What am I doing? Her stomach turned. She put the instrument down and looked at the Csrym T.

Black voluted glyphs spread profligate like curled legs, amphibious and strange. They wrapped thorny triple- jointed arms around her mind; clutched, jerked, teased and baited her.

Centric figures, bolide detonations in ink, swept out across the page in comet patterns. Stellar holocausts. Cosmic orgies. Transient metempsychosis: like sheet lightning, stuttering through ten thousand bodies in an instant, through clouds and rich celestial humors.

Sena’s eyes raced, struggled to stay ahead of the darkness that devoured the tail of every symbol she understood. The inked pictures played tricks.

Dead things walked.

Suns burnt out amid cataclysmic trauma. Cold alien oceans sparkled and slithered with a million breeding things. Harsh light stabbed out of primeval mist, out of cells that were neither plant nor animal nor anything in between.

The Csrym T might have been the sacral vade mecum for creatures capable of profound modulation. But there was too much of it. Too much in it.

Sena’s pulpy head couldn’t help abbreviating the abstruse concepts, shortening perfect structures into imperfection, substituting across the prevaricated line that separated beauty from horror.

Her brain, her body, in the context of the Csrym T, was a fibrous cyst: temporal, momentary, riddled with lethal flaws. Already, on reflex, she had pulled a comforting shroud over the blinding concepts, coddling herself from a toxic rarefaction of truth.

She pushed the book away.

I can’t avoid it. In moments I’ve lost centuries.

Words in Dark Tongue made sounds inside her skull. They searched for sustenance and found nothing.

I will fix my eyes, she thought. I will master this thing.

She picked the scalpel back up, made sure her bowl and rags were ready. Carefully, carefully, she began to cut into her eye.

She felt the blades touch her cornea, slide into it at an angle. The clear coat flopped up, granting access to the lens. Her movements were subtle, careful. She whispered as she went, using tiny bleeding capillaries to work the Unknown Tongue. She crafted facets with the double knife, cut inscriptions that would have made a miniaturist gape. There were numbers. There were shapes. Angles and circles and tiny triangles engraved on multiple layers of cornea. She cut her eye into thin sheets of film, put diagrams on various strata, sandwiched them together, compressed them.

She dabbed at her tears. An endless gush of fluid poured across her face. Finally she was done.

Now . . . the other eye.

After several more hours, throbbing in pain, she slipped the mask over her head. It was dark but the Inti’Drou glyphs still floundered in her brain. She concentrated on something simple, something capable of restoring her identity. She thought of Caliph and the way Prince Mortiman had looked at him.

Sena woke up blind. She could feel the mask working on the swelling. Like a smell-feast, the shylock was actually a more docile cousin of the scarlet horror. It was brown, silent and sleepy. It could be cut and sewn like a sheet of leather in order to fashion gloves or boots. This one had been hibernating in her pack for two years. She felt its gentle suction on her swollen eyes.

She fumbled for the bed. Caliph’s side was still made, pillow undisturbed beneath the quilt. “Caliph?”

She was seeing things, bits of light that could not be light. The shylock kept her in darkness. Am I hallucinating?

She got up. She could tell where the fireplace was. She could see it, snagged against the wall like a tuft of cotton in a thicket. It moved. It was ephemeral. Its shadows seemed to breathe. The room swayed as if underwater. Sena stumbled and fell. She felt blood trickle down her cheek.

“Godsfire!” Her head hurt. Her bladder was going to explode. “Caliph?” Bluish impressions tracked across her cerebellum from the right. She turned as if toward a light, smacked her forehead on the bed. “Yella byn! Fuck!” She reached out, touched the wooden pillar, groped past it, trying to make sense of what she interpreted as sight. She tried to shut her eyes then cursed at her stupidity. She couldn’t close her mind against the impressions even with the shylock clinging to her face. “Mother of Mizraim I have to pee!”

The shylock left its presence in her blood and forced her kidneys to work overtime. She wondered how long she had been asleep. I can’t make it! She thought of the agonizing walk to the toilet.

Pastel colors rinsed her brain. She could see the bank of windows in Caliph’s bedroom. She reached out, walked toward them, uncertain they were real.

One of the panes swung in and folded against the wall admitting a chilly mass of air, fresh with rural smells.