The Last Page

now. Once she saw a chair, a gas lamp, a wine bottle. Now she realizes that what she saw was really only what she thought.

Adumbrations.

She used to see sketches of meaning, instantaneous renders of objects flickering through her mind. She could categorize them quickly, use them as signposts, directional cues. But now she understands that it wouldn’t have mattered how many adjectives she attached to the wine bottle, or how closely she might have studied it with her old eyes. Even if she had measured it, weighed it, calculated its yaw pitch and roll, its potential kinetic energy, its tensile strength . . .

A textbook full of wine bottle statistics would have still been an approximation. A pile of different disconnected thoughts.

Now she sees. She sees the whole bottle. She sees its layers unified, interpreted and as it is. She sees it emotionally, potentially, with sunlight streaming through, casting colors and shadows. She sees it in every possible light. Every angle, temperature and locale. She sees it physically, every molecule, every particle in its composition. She sees it chronologically before it is a bottle, being made into a bottle, as a bottle now. She sees it broken, shattered, molten, every kind of death. She sees it spiritually, diagramed in ether, its eternal planning in a thought. She sees it lovely, as a sentimental gift, a talisman, embodying the memory of a celebration, an anniversary, a first drink, a last drink, a love, the method of seduction, a habit, something forgotten or ignored, a bauble, an implement of cruelty and limitless torture. She can still call it a bottle. She remembers the old word. But the word is empty and cannot pass any of the bottle’s meaning as she sees it now, nothing of the true thing.

And it is not just the bottle that she sees this way. It is everything in the world.

She sees all objects not as symbols but as they are, whole, unified, with nothing lost in translation between her consciousness and her eyes. She sees the thing, all things. Directly. And this, she understands suddenly, is also the power of the Csrym T.

Inverted.

She has realized. The problem with other books is their length and imprecision. So many sentences, ideas, chapters . . . all tied together perhaps, but fragmented . . . hidden, buried in the pages. The concepts must be explained, diagramed, with paragraphs, examples, forcing the words to do their job, to communicate clearly all the steps of cooking veal, or building a centrifuge, or getting along with one’s lover. And in the end, there are bits that stick, like a red flower in the grass, the main idea or several key ingredients. The mind sorts through the pile left behind, the chunks it can remember.

But not in the Csrym T.

In the Csrym T, the Inti’Drou glyphs are so much more than blueprints for systems, for worlds. They are not just symbols on a page. Inti’Drou glyphs are nothing less than the objects they describe. Not pictograms. The math of the thing is there, trapped, twisted intolian ink. The math is alive. Compressed. Like in a spring. Undo the latch, release the mechanism, and the glyph unfolds, into planets, into creatures, into stars and subdimensions. The glyphs are more than real. They are reality.

And the glyphs are whole, on one page, captured in a glance. No chapters to sort through. No metaphors or diagrams or grammar used at all. The initial confusion she faced between hundreds of subjects and objects has gelled, cleared. With her new eyes she sees the raw ethereal information contained in particles of light. In ink. All of it together. Together. Precise.

Words in Hinter, words in Trade, haunt her through the night. Torture her with their constraints. She dreams of definitions that do not fit.

But there are some words, strange, cooling words, like moon sweat, that dapple her pia mater during sleep, running molten cold through her sulci, soaking deep into her brain. They sound smooth . . .

Ssli. Ooil-Uauth. hloht.

They are giving her direction. They are telling her what to do. And despite her desire to help Caliph she finds herself instead looking out across the world, perhaps because the facets of her eyes derive from cuts meant for hunting. But she has modified the angles, used the Csrym Tto adjust the purpose of her eyes. It is safe to say that no one in the Sisterhood has eyes like Sienae Iilool.

In the autumn chill, she sits at night, facing south, staring through her bedroom wall. She looks from her vanity through Blkton, South Fell and Maruchine, through phantasmagoric drainpipes in the substructure of Ghoul Court.

She sees the slaughter of the muck spies, the venting of blood into cavernous byways. The Lua’grc are cleaning up. The flawless are moving. The huge maggot bodies she associates with the attack on her cottage are abandoning Isca’s drains.

Yrisl will be the only muck left, protected by the castle and his loyalty to Caliph Howl.

The Lua’grc are not angry with him though they would kill him if they could. Yrisl does not answer the dispatches they have sent him.

But the Lua’grc are removed from human emotion. They would kill him out of utility rather than rage.

The city watch now recognizes the Lua’grc half-breed spies. The mucks are of no further use. So they are eaten, bones and all, rich nutrients ingested, the blubber and talons of the cannibals fortified preparatory to the journey ahead.

Only the flawless survive.

But they are not a vengeful race. For them, carnage is holomorphy, tactics and something close to joy or delight. They have no rituals for their dead, no tombs or graveyards. The dead are eaten without thought as a matter of course.

Sena watches through the wall, and begins to understand them as the flawless grow fat and sink from Ghoul Court into deep reservoirs and cold abyssal bourns that gush or leak south below the world crust. She begins to understand them as ancient organisms that follow routes like salmon where the water has not seen sun for many thousand years.

The Lua’grc abandon Old Duny’s brumal backwash, migrating south into less frostbitten waters. Sena sees them course through tunnels across the convoluted miles. Under the continent’s blind-making shadow, their journey will take several months to complete. But Sena has read about them, knows that eventually they will find their way by touch or sense of smell or some more primitive perception no human ecologist has ever catalogued or named.

In the end, the legendary Seas of Yloch will welcome them home; they will pour their bodies in, mingling with slurry spilt from culverts older than the Duchy of Stonehold. They will drizzle out of sewer systems designed by the slaver race before the advent of the hexapala’s eight thousandth year. And for a while they will be at home in olden structures built up in the deep, waiting for word to come from lung where the last of the true Lua’grc, the last of the true flawless dwell.

So this is what it’s like, she thinks. This is what it means to be Sslia . . .

Sena orders a servant to buy two crows in Octul Box and bring them to the high tower garret. It is time she did something. Stonehold is the only place she has to lay her head and she knows acutely, since rifling Lewis’ brain, that Caliph is not winning.

The black wisp of soot that haunts her, tells her what to do. But first, like all good holomorphs, she decides . . . she insists on running a proof.

Sena locks the door. The servant has come and gone. A large cage hanging from the rafters contains a pair of rooks. They blink angrily and grouse for space. They will save her badly bruised eyes; she has left