The Last Page

case of greener grass? Or just a singular truism common to both our species: the need to explore, to conquer new territory. To learn, expand and grow. The need to create and destroy. The evolution of the inner beast. Becoming more of whatever it is we are. Creator, killer, philanthropist . . .

Just another natural increment in our progression. In the development of gods. They are gods. Not the deaf blind disconnected gods of Incense Street. They are waking gods. Undying. Planning gods. Proximate and looming.

Sena tucked the notebook between a pillow and her thigh. She picked up the Csrym T and opened it to her mark. Just ahead was another passage about the Last Page.

She swore.

The Last Page of what?

She flipped to the back of the book. It ended like most books, abruptly. There was nothing special about the final page except one small thing.

Nathaniel Howl had written in his precise scholarly hand: Ha! Clever Pun. And so like tattoos they now seem to me!

Always another mystery.

Cameron had told her Nathaniel had gone crazy. Maybe it didn’t mean anything at all.

She studied through lunch into late afternoon.

The pages were smooth and cool. Like dead things, the old necromancer’s hand had marked them up. She was starting there, with pencil and ink, with wide margins filled with notes and references.

“The jellyfish glyph.”

Sena looked up, startled. An old man’s voice had whispered the words. They scraped along the curves inside her ear, tracing from the outer edges in, sounding like the weird dry brush of a fingertip moving. A sensual exploration, analytic and at once perverse. There was no one in the room.

The words had been so clear. She had never verbalized them and had written the approximation of them in her notebook for the first time earlier today.

Could someone have been watching while she wrote?

Deeply disturbed, she set her studies aside and slipped out of bed. She checked the door first. It was shut tight. Feeling childish, she felt around under the bed. She wanted to remove the shylock, to see with her real eyes that she was alone. She opened the wardrobes, batted around jackets and shirts and dresses until she felt positive no one could be inside. She even checked the windows and the ledges for intruders. All she found was birdlime and chilly air.

I’m not going crazy, she told herself.

This is holomorphy.

Perhaps the Eighth House had composed an argument against her. Perhaps Giganalee could send glamours from leagues away . . .

Sena waited for the voice to come again but it did not.

For roughly one week Sena was alone in Isca Castle. Caliph did not return and Gadriel either truly did not know where he had gone or masterfully hid his knowledge.

Her eyes were black and purple, tinged with green. Badly bruised, she still slept with the shylock at night.

No one seemed capable of telling her where Caliph had gone. The weather turned cold. Though the castle boilers had been fixed, she had the servants keep a fire roaring in the bedroom and a thermal crank besides.

The servants snickered. They told her this was not cold. Cold had not even come to Stonehold yet. There was frost, yes. There was snow in the mountains. But the crops still stood in the fields, defying the shift in season. The corn stood out to dry, right down to the wire according to promises in the almanac. Every year the Duchy held its breath and hoped the austromancers were correct.

Sena shivered under blankets and quilts. The maids, the butlers, even Gadriel seemed to have abandoned her. She started drinking to keep warm.

She started drinking to bullwhip the coarse black ink strokes twisting through her brain. She could feel them cutting into the meat inside her skull. She started drinking to dull the pain.

In the dark, she whispered to her bottles. Behind the black glass, lutescent liquid hung in suspended animation. Inked labels with recent dates denoted when each of the delicate sherries had been sentenced to life below the cork. She regarded the bottles as tombs. Prisons that kept out light.

She drank for the sake of the sherry. She drank to free them. In the twinkling blackness, she drank while watching a bottle she had flung from the neck, burst against the hearth. It shattered with a triumphant explosion of tiny shards and pale juice. Each splinter of glass, each droplet, they glistened midair, turning slowly, exultant. She drank in celebration.

She knelt down as if at a grave and patted the wet floor like she might have patted the place Ns’ ashes were buried. When she lifted her hand, a ringlet of razor-edged glass dangled from her thumb. It hung there like a piece of strange jewelry, like a parasite. She took a drink and pulled it out, watched her blood ooze from the slit. It seemed too dark, nearly black against her cold white flesh. Like ink, she thought. As I move, so moves the quill of the gods. She smeared her thumb in fantastic random patterns over the floor. “They will not hold me,” she said, laughing. “They will not lay me in some catacomb to ferment.” She dragged her gushing thumb in ever more erratic circles. “They will not use me!” she shrieked. “As a tool—”

Two of the servants found her and dragged her from the glass-strewn room.

They bandaged her hand. They swept, mopped and swept again. They got out a clean charmeuse robe with lace that plunged past her waist. They tied it around her and put her in bed. Then they took away her bottles and left her in the dark.

The darkness thickened into layers of wax. Layers of murk and loneliness and irritating fear. She felt herself suffocating: an insect below a dripping candle. The servants slept. Solitary guards rasped and scraped through the empty hallway beyond her door.

Sena pulled her knees up under the covers. The lacy robe barely covered her ass. She held herself for warmth while the castle’s silence tore into her. This, she decided, was a deeply haunted place.

I’m not mad. I’m not mad.

She found herself watching the tapestries, hung in silent folds, animated by the coals in the fireplace. The coals cast nimble black demons off every piece of furniture. She stared for so long that when it finally came she couldn’t tell if it was just another illusion.

In a small terrible hour, like a plume of soot, an ancient scholar’s robe rose on the draft and dragged across the floor. Dreadfully thin and hunched it sat in the tall carven chair near the door and whispered of the immutable past.

I’m not mad. But she did not sleep.

In the morning, bleary and wasted, she capitulated with the specter’s demand and opened up the grimoire. Her life had became its pages.

Several days later, she noticed the Herald. It was her only link to events beyond the castle.

The newspaper told her King Lewis had been arrested the same day Caliph had left and that he was being detained in Isca Castle, a captive guest in one of the towers.

A peculiar insult, the article validated her recent feelings of debarment. She thrust the article at Gadriel and demanded an explanation. The seneschal glanced at her eyes as he did every morning and quickly looked away. He demurred pathetically, presented her with a choice of northern coffees.

His disavowal put her in a rage.

She threw the Herald down in front of him and screamed. But the High Seneschal was a formidable adversary. In response to her tantrum, he offered her cream.

Recognizing the iron wall for what it was, Sena ordered him from the room.

That night, she strapped her utility belt around her waist, tugged on her soft black boots and slipped her kyru in its sheath. King Lewis would be well guarded. She closed her eyes and the colors returned, guiding her. She knew the way.