The Last Page

heavy invisible slime poured into her mouth. Into her nose and throat. She couldn’t speak. She struggled. She thought she heard an old man humming far away.

Sena twisted as her feet came loose from the stone. She flailed. Floating. Fighting for her life. She couldn’t hold her breath any longer, she began to choke. As the jellied air poured in, deep inside her throat, she felt something bite.

On the side of the castle, the godling-stain bubbled, a black honeycomb of flesh pouring from its hole, plasmoid, tentacular, hideously fast, a complex mollusk unfolding.

The black pseudopodia foamed toward her, silent as thrown ink, glistening with deep cribriform patterns. There was a burst of prurient pink, an outward thrust of bright color trimming those impossible lobes. The pseudopodia didn’t move in concert. They were not like the anemones from Desdae’s biology labs or any other creature with a cognizant grasp. The outpouring flesh, if it was flesh, moved like an abruption . . . like something that had exploded from a wound. Mentally, Sena screamed.

The blood potion floated in front of her like the glowing tube at Grouselich Hospital, the disgorged red contents hovered, roiled, and remained suspended. Her eyes glazed, her throat relaxed, the slime-thick air poured into her lungs. Something bit deeper, like serrated teeth, slicing into the soft tissue of her pharynx, biting, slicing, she could taste her own blood.

Those ebbing holojoules . . . waiting for her voice. She thought of Megan’s transumption hex, of the Devourer: Gr-ner Shie.

In the distance, the sound of thunder or zeppelin guns tortured the sky. Sena’s body convulsed from lack of oxygen . . . the black flesh was all around her. And she was floating, stuttering. Catapult. Zoetrope. Where was Caliph? The Thae’gn’s sweet mucus filled her sinuses with incomprehensible alien dreaming, scent-shadows of her own death. The curl of smoke that was shaped like an old man did nothing.

Snow fell. Odd. It seemed unaffected by the thick air. Her vision was blurring. Then suddenly, she was assaulted from every direction, both internally as well as all across her skin. Her jacket tore away in parallel strips. Her clothing disintegrated. She could suddenly breathe but the pain was exquisite. Black tendrils sliced gill-like slits into her skin. Those arms that looked so slippery, surprisingly powerful . . . and rough. Like coarse sandpaper grit. They snagged and tore at reality. She could see them shredding the fiber of space with every subtle movement that they made, reality turning to mist, threadbare wisps that dispersed slightly, revealing glimpses of someplace else . . . someplace hidden . . . hovering just behind. Space closed as the arms moved, re- weaving, healing, but vaguely warped . . . vaguely scarred.

She was breathing through her skin . . . or maybe she had stopped breathing altogether. Her body had been filleted, every part of her exposed, like a child’s snowflake cut from paper. She hung in tatters in the air, bones and organs twisting. A gory paper doll.

Black filaments of something like mist condensed, forming webs below her dangling guts. They braided, wound up, tugged gently at her tattered flesh. She felt the manipulation, not from without, but from within, at a cellular level, a molecular level.

Her smallest parts, the fibers of her tissue, the atoms themselves were grinding against each other, turning, realigning, tuning themselves to some new atomic pole. They snapped suddenly, locking together, fundamentally changed, perfectly attuned to this new orientation.

And Sena was back together, packed tight and sutured shut and the great black mass trimmed with vaginal pink was collapsing, withdrawing, once again becoming a void, an empty hole on the castle wall.

Sena dropped, no longer floating. The potion of blood now spun, falling as it should have done minutes ago. She had been struggling so hard to scream that now the sound ripped from her throat, filled with numbers.

“Not that one,” the curl of smoke whispered. It had not moved from its position during the entire ordeal, while the godling-stain had chined and sliced and then reinvented her anew. “Use the beacon.” It was a command not spoken in Hinter or Trade. Sena had no clear sense of individual words, only the collective meaning.

Without thinking or questioning, she obeyed. Words gushed from her mouth, a torrent of repellent sounds. Was she imagining it, or could she actually hear a ghostly stopwatch drumming through its tiny gears.

Faster!

The old thin voice sequenced like a horologe, just outside the hurricane of her concentration.

Her flesh prickled.

Faster!

Sena let the Inti’Drou glyphs sink their blackened compound forms into her eyes. She could see them even shut, behind her eyelids, played like picture lanterns across her brain. She was preparing to inject portions of their compressed multidimensional data into her argument.

Sena nearly choked on the glottal sounds that tumbled up her throat. Lightning rived the towers of Isca Castle. Snow fell. Thunder boomed as if the compression crack of the Pplarian guns had finally reached the parapets half an hour late.

She gathered the holojoules from the whirling blood before it splattered across the floor.

To focus Megan’s transumption hex, she called out, sending up a beacon from the tourelle, screaming at Gr-ner Shie to see her. Forgotten were her plans of helping Caliph. She was obeying the whisper in her head.

The beacon went up, a meaningless pillar of math that bent every dimension, useless except in pinpointing her location to the thing that had been roused for the sole purpose of devouring Stonehold.

“You will save the Duchy,” the trace of smoke assured her, sibilant and dry like a leaf-rattle in the wind.

Glassy shapes spread suddenly from the direction of the zeppelin war. Delitescent palpi puffed the sky from the other side of nothing, fungal forms swelling. The stratosphere burst like fluted glass gone wild. Sena saw jelly slipping through crystal pearls, glistening worms the color of empty air.

Colors played across her face. So beautiful! Incandescent pink. Flaming, cerulean blue.

There was no doubt that the thing that had eaten Fallow Down had found her! This time it was not a random abrogation of luck. It was cognizant as it groped its legion parts in the direction of her voice.

But then, while the heavens went berserk, something happened that she had not expected. The snow hovered, retreated, fell backward, the dawn eclipsed by unseen mass. Some continental shadow spread like an infection below the maggoty celebration in the sky.

No thunder.

No sound.

Just freezing silence across miles of air.

And then the distant zeppelins buckled like red gelatinous creatures caught in riptide. Not just Saergaeth’s airships, but the High King’s as well. She saw them fold in on themselves and vanish from the sky. The armies on the ground, every building west of the Hold, was unmade. Even the clouds, the great storm front moving west, evaporated like a clot of steam.

Sena felt the plurality of their deaths as an impact in her chest. So many people at once! But the madness in the sky was not done yet. Its glassy writhing mass surged toward her. It homed in on her position atop the battlements, spreading east. Sena steeled herself. She felt the temperature drop suddenly and then: the godling- stain exploded a second time, thrusting from its hole like something hidden in a shell. Its untamed limbs skewered the clouds, then curled, as if gripping prey before pulling back into the void.

Sena looked down to find herself lying on the roof amid shattered chunks of ice. Her naked flesh had gone mausoleum gray.

CHAPTER 41

There was nothing anymore. Nothing on the wall. Nothing covering her skin. The curl of smoke, the whisperer, had dissolved if it had ever been there at all.

Sena looked down at herself, albescent with an oyster-colored glow. Whorls of blue flickered under her fingernails, luminescing. Her body had been extraordinized under an obscene stylus. She looked at the patterns and laughed out loud. “I see! I see!”