The Last Page

Time became something she could gloss before it happened. She could see castle guards before they turned the corner, saw their numbers like halos in the air. Probabilities. Angles. Algorithms of the next.

Her vision didn’t compute in three dimensions anymore. It was ghosted with time, future happenings all around her. Sometimes they blurred where probabilities split, made whole corridors hazy with risk. But if she waited, silent and safe, things changed, pathways opened, unpredictability passed away and she could move again. Pale cones of perception spread out from people’s eyes, both current and future. All she had to do was walk or stand outside their line of sight.

She left the High King’s bedroom through a window. Since her outburst, Gadriel had placed sentries just outside the door . . . in case she felt ill again, he said, or needed assistance.

Sena smiled at his pathetic attempt to cage her and stretched for the cornice above the window, touched it and left the bedroom empty in her wake. She moved quickly, like an arachnid, fingers sticky with holomorphy. She was blindfolded but she could see. She sensed Lewis in the towers above, behind a locked and brightly guarded door. He sat by himself, playing with a stack of ivory plaques, fortune-telling devices once trusted by the general public, now sold in Three Cats only to amuse.

Sena saw the guards as well. Her new eyes made everything easy. She re-entered the castle through an open window twenty stories up into the night. It was a lightless side room and she paused to listen to the men outside the door.

Her eyes were well, but she still wore the shylock. She had discovered a new use. With a single word she could pinch it, goad it with a cantrip and the thing would tighten to her face, appendages that normally hung like decorative leather straps writhed. She felt it take a deeper bite. Blood oozed below the mask, ran in perfect painted lines along her cheek.

She spoke, robbed the creature of its meal, forced it to draw more sustenance as she burnt her own holojoules in prosecution of the air. Logic twisted. The Unknown Tongue sentenced six castle guards to coma.

Sena opened the door and stepped over their sleeping bodies. The shylock squirmed. It took only what it needed then stopped. She bent to recover a heavy ring of keys.

Beyond King Lewis’ door she could tell the coals were dying, dribbling purple light across the floor.

She pulled the bolt back with a loose clank and the thick portal opened slowly, heavy timbers floating on oil.

Lewis looked up to see her standing in the door frame.

He scowled, obviously trying to make sense of it. She imagined the extraordinary image: a blond woman, seemingly blind, the fallen guards, the little trails of red oozing from her mask.

Encircling her was an oversized belt that holstered her sickle and other tools. In her right hand was a potion, a decanter she had just pulled out. It was made of glass and filled with something red.

She saw Lewis toy with the idea of taking her hostage but the gory potion and her mask seemed to distract him.

“I wouldn’t,” she said. “I’m the High King’s witch.”

“So I’ve read in the papers. Midnight snack?” He gestured to the decanter.

“Something like that. Holomorphic provisions.”

“Ah.” Lewis lifted his eyebrows and then gestured to the bed. “I’m afraid I’m short on furniture, but please . . . sit.”

Sena placed herself on the edge of the mattress, one knee draped over the other, perched like something weightless. She dangled the decanter between her fingers.

“It’s dark in here.”

Lewis chuckled. “Try taking that . . .” he noticed the blood tears again, “. . . mask off.”

Sena came to the point.

“I want to know why you’re here.”

Lewis smiled. “You’re not here officially are you?”

“I’m not asking,” said Sena.

Lewis glanced out at the incapacitated guards. “No. I suppose you’re not. Pretty as a seashell though. Maybe my friends contracted you through Skellum to clean me up?”

“What friends?”

Lewis only chuckled. He seemed prepared for this, ready for some assassin to end his journey through the courts. Sena realized that he wouldn’t talk, that she was wasting time. She liked him. She liked his false resignation, his sense of humor, the calculations she could feel him making underneath it all. And yet, she let the decanter slip from her hand. Delicate facets shattered on impact, a sloppy crunch that burst against the floor like a bloodsucking arachnid made of glass.

Already, her survey of the Csrym T had augmented her skills. She recycled Caliph’s mind-reading formula from the library in Desdae and pared it down, added to it and pared it down again.

King Lewis’ mind went blank and Sena rummaged in it, semimethodically, as if searching a head of lettuce for bugs. She found all kinds of things. She knew why Lewis’ chest hurt.

It had started after a squad of Iscan military personnel had escorted him forcefully back to Isca Castle. Alani’s men had discovered his alliance with the Pandragonians.

Lewis himself had helped smuggle the solvitriol blueprints out of the country.

But he hadn’t confessed or denied. He had simply stood, chest hurting, wishing that he hadn’t been caught.

Lewis knew the Pandragonians and so Sena knew them too. She saw them clearly in his head. Bjorn Amphungtal and Msgr. Pratt.

She knew how they had stopped on their way to Isca Castle on the second of Kam, pausing at Kennan Keep to meet with Roric Feldman. They had moored. They had disgorged great piles of weapons and supplies onto Saergaeth’s new flight deck. They had signed contracts and promised to help remove Caliph from the throne in exchange for favorable trade agreements once Saergaeth took the throne.

And that was Lewis’ secret: that Pandragor and Yorba and several other countries were watching Stonehold’s civil war with vulture eyes. That other countries had become intimately involved in Stonehold’s civil war and were counting on Caliph Howl to lose.

The ambassadors that had flown to Isca Castle had only ever been a ruse. Deals had already been cut with the Shrdnae Sisterhood, with Saergaeth, with Peter Lark.

David’s set of blueprints had already been sent south.

And now Pandragor would be sending zeppelins, actual troops to bolster Saergaeth’s mighty fleet.

For the first time, Sena understood with sudden numbing fear, the precarious position of Caliph’s reign. The impossibility of any chance that he would succeed. She swore in a whisper. Saergaeth was going to win!

Sena withdrew from Lewis’ brain, lobotomized the memory of her, locked the door and crept spiderlike back to her bedroom. The guards would wake, confused to find the shattered vial, and that would be her only trace.

Sena did not sleep that night. She pondered instead how she might use the Csrym T to help save her king.

²⁵ U.T. Approximate pronunciation: Cal’cr’Nok.

CHAPTER 38

When Ghoul Court is cleaned, it is like doing a thorough brush across the front of the city’s teeth, the visible gunk comes off. But the more conniving criminal element sinks further out of sight. Sena sees them with her new eyes, waiting in Isca’s deepest cavities and cracks. She dreams of them at night, moaning creatures in the sewers, far below the opera house, bellowing a nameless emotion.

She can no longer talk about what she sees. Her eyes are healing, the corneal layers gelling into a single lens, a single filter that delivers transcendent messages to her mind. She cannot talk about what she sees because there are no words to describe. Only old words. Words that call things as they used to be, not as they are