The Last Page

Caliph’s hall, crooned strangely through the ether. Sena could feel them in the castle, inchoate forms, reverberating, trembling: monstrous catacombs of flesh.

Flesh was an approximation.

“They are my gods,” Sena whispered. She could not see them, even with her eyes.

“Excuse me?” said the huntsman.

Sena ignored his incredulous expression and left the grand hall without excusing herself. She wandered out into the icy halls, feeling dizzy, not knowing where she was going. A whisper pulled her down a passageway she had never used before, drawing her into a deserted tourelle. From its windows she could see occasional flickers of purple light through the glass, stammering from the Pplarian guns. Seven miles out, war was raging and she knew that Caliph was losing. I need to help him . . .

But the thought was blurry, strangely inconsequential, like the memory of something she had meant to do but then changed her mind. Sena whispered in the dark. “Soon . . .” She heard scratching voices in her head, like the needle on a phonograph with no recorded sound.

“Soon, soon.”

Her skull churned. A bottle full of newts. The whisper that had pulled her here was familiar now. Old and damp and chilly. Disjunctly, it induced the smell-memory of decomposing leaves. “Soon . . .” Around her, the forgotten baggage of a dozen High Kings seemed to brood. Fur cloaks, carved coffers and ugly diplomatic gifts nested like lonesome birds in the loft, dreaming darkness and betrayal.

Sena looked out through the dirty panes at the snow-covered land. Tentacles of light filled the sky, oozing between the mountain peaks.

She watched the veils slowly ebb and ruffle. The tentacles were breaking up as dawn approached. They refracted and moved over the north.

She stepped closer to the window, felt the filthy panes rattle in the wind. She rested her palms against the glass and mused that maybe, just maybe, she was going mad.

An anomalous noise from overhead jolted her back to reality.

An old man’s whisper licked her ear canal. “Go up.”

There was a wooden staircase that pulled down. Above it, a trapdoor glowered in the ceiling. Sena scowled and pulled the rope. The staircase lowered with a creak. This particular turret did not connect with the rest of the battlements. It hung alone in a forlorn crevice of the castle’s northwest face like an unnoticed tick in a vertical fold of hardened skin.

There were no conventional means to reach its rooftop except the rusted door.

Sena took hold of the bolt with both hands.

Perhaps it’s something flapping in the wind.

The sound came again. Precise. Betraying intent. The bolt popped back suddenly, scraping her knuckles on burred iron. She swore. Hesitantly, she put the back of her shoulder against the door.

Ice crackled. A cold dark wind whistled in as she managed a half-inch crack. She pushed with every muscle in her body, relaxed and took another step, working her way expertly up the rickety stairs, maximizing her leverage.

Finally the heavy hinges gave a painful snap and the trapdoor swung all the way open, smashing back against the roof, a thick sheet of ice shattering in every direction.

A square of cloudy sky grumbled overhead. Despite the crushing cold, she wasted no time pulling herself up.

The turret’s architecture formed a small octagon, obscure and shadowed by the castle’s walls. From its solitary rooftop she gazed down on Stonehold wrapped in snow from a perspective that obscured the city.

To the north there was something black, as if a giant had thrown a fistful of mud at the castle wall. It clung, oblique, opaque, hiding in the gloom of the castle’s own acre-wide shadow. The air around it trembled as though thick fumes like fuel vapor, heavier than air, drooled out of it and down across the frozen moat. That, or parts of its shape were slavering back out of physical space, into the ether.

“Why are You here?” she whispered.

The massive thing did not move. It wavered. It writhed almost and seemed to slurp at the sky even though it made no sound. It did not move from its position on the wall. A point of light, exquisitely bright, shivered in its central void, surrounded by other lights, all of them the color of welding sparks. Its exact shape was impossible to tell, even for Sena’s eyes, because it seemed to have an invalid structure. The more she looked, the more it occurred to her that it was somehow imploded, a re-entrant polygon, though softened and organic, a mushy concavity or hole rather than any shape at all. Light bent around it. It exuded cold.

One of Them. One of the Thae’gn. Maybe it was the one she had bound to protect her at the Porch of Sth, responsible for utterly discreating the flawless Lua’grc that had attacked her in her home. Maybe it was from the Halls under Sandren. One of the Hidden. A black lump of mucus, a cancer of space. Gleaming.

The lights inside it fizzled in and out of sight except for the great one at its center. Like a cell, that bright gleaming nucleolus surrounded by cosmic black cytoplasm, shimmering lysosomes . . .

She was making up metaphors primarily because she had the feeling that, even with her new eyes, she wasn’t seeing it correctly, as if the gigantic thing refused to translate properly through any kind of sight.

There was no communication from it. Nothing she could sense, except for the logical assumption that it had been drawn here by the book . . . just like its lesser cousin whose head hung in the great hall. Sena envisioned more of them, attracted by the Csrym T, cementing themselves like barnacles to Isca Castle, great abysmal vacuums of them. Deep plastered colonies of empty holes, drawing together like negative cells, building a gulf of tissue, a void, a parody of oyster flesh around a pearl, growing over the irritation of the book.

Maybe.

In truth she had no idea why it was here or what the book meant to it.

The incomprehensible smell of the thing washed over her. So sweet. Like rose flesh. Like a flower she had never smelled before. It was cloying. Overpowering.

Maybe her proof, her bolt aimed at Megan, had drawn it. After all, it was the first time she had taken numbers from the Csrym T and turned them into holomorphic force. Again, it was just a guess. Her legs felt weak. Her body modulated, softening as if subject to wavelengths emanating from its core. She had the unpleasant memory of Megan’s hex at Deep Cloister and felt like she might wobble apart, muscles waggling free of her bones.

Is this an attack? Or am I simply too close? Like trying to swallow a strandy web of phlegm at the back of her throat, Sena had to concentrate on simple systems. She couldn’t walk; it felt like she was standing in pudding. Her thoughts slowed.

Maybe the head of the Cl’cr’Nok, hanging in the great hall, had drawn it. But would something so powerful and different from its physical cousin hold a grudge? Would it even care about murder?

Sena didn’t know. She had no answers as she stood, trapped, feeling its cold, unseen secretions envelop her like gelatin.

There was a potion in her belt. Hemofurtum, she thought dully and reached for it with exaggerated sluggishness. She had kept it close in anticipation of the formula that would help Caliph win. She had been planning to perform it . . . right now . . . or earlier. She couldn’t remember. Why hadn’t she done it earlier? Instead of wandering aimlessly through the castle halls?

She didn’t know.

She pried the potion’s cap off like a clumsy drunk and watched the crimson fluid purl upward in the air. That shouldn’t be happening, she thought dreamily.

A shadow, like a brushstroke, had appeared beside her. It hung just above the left side of the battlement in her peripheral sight, smoky and gaunt and curled. Black, with a vague wisp of white hair and within it, a hint of cimmerian eyes, burning through the cold, staring across the empty gulf between the tourelle and the thing that boiled on the wall.

“Nathan?” she asked. But the specter only watched. Sena felt like laughing, everything was so bizarre. She opened her mouth to speak, trying to gather holojoules from the weightless potion. Panic. She couldn’t breathe. The