The Last Page

found a set of abandoned stone huts near a lake. Ragged green thickets grew in profusion along the shore. She hugged the waterline and made good progress. Her side still pained her and she rested often but a gnawing anxiety filled her stomach. Eloth belonged to long-toothed predacious things.

Sarchal hounds, with jaws capable of killing a horse, hunted the wilds. And there were other horrors. Enormous black otter-things with tiny malevolent eyes and twitching ears, long dark muzzles bristling with whiskers and gharial teeth. Unknown numbers of them lay in wait below these northern lakes.

Sena kept her eyes open and moved quickly. The undergrowth gave her no choice but to skirt the shore. Eventually the pebbled beach gave way to a shadowed drop-off overhung with flowering thickets. She could see several large fish, backs like dull battered tin, gliding in the murk below.

She scrambled up a soft embankment and found an animal track that led her back to the water through a garden of cattails that sprang from semisolid ground.

She tread carefully on the shifting sod of what seemed to be floating dirt and vegetation. The rich close stench of metholinate burbled up through black, snot-thick water. She couldn’t see four inches down.

After half an hour, breathing through her mouth, the cattails thinned and the track emerged but ended in disappointment.

Sena looked with disgust at a stinking morass of deep feculent mud and squalid pools. Ruby-bellied reed flies darted through the vapor. The mire looked impossible to cross and her trail had given out far from shore.

Her eyes cast about for a way of crossing the muck and landed on a series of large flat rocks. They were east of her, farther out, vulnerable to one of the otter-things but she knew she could leap the distance between them without much strain and decided to risk it.

The hungry flies swarmed, bellies like gemstones. She leapt to the first then the second and in such fashion crossed the inlet.

The insects pursued her until she reached the top of a slide of boulders at the lake’s north end. There, the storm front struck relentlessly and a cold freshet of wind swept the flies back down to their reeking hollows by the lake.

Sena worked her way above the skree.

She moved gracefully. She was trained for this.

After three thousand vertical feet and five miles, the spires and dome of Esma rose slowly into view. It was an ancient thing. Ugly and old like a fractured skull.

She checked her watch as the first small drops of rain began to fall.

From here she could see most of the valley in ominous panorama. All around her, the mountains rose in tortured gray piles, blasted back from the valley’s pit as if by a synchronized cacophony of screams.

Sena climbed into a flat barren clearing before the desolate temple. Perspiration licked tight curls along her neck.

The whole of Esma had been raised in cryte, a white rock that held light like velvet. But the closer she got the grayer it looked. Ruinous after eighteen thousand years of storms, if it had not been for the cryte’s extraordinary granite-surpassing durability, the whole edifice would have dissolved like a sugar lump. As it was, great chunks had given way. Unseen blocks and entire substructures had slid cataclysmically down with the skree into the lake.

As if someone had plunged broken femurs into the ground, jagged fragile towers, sundered and hollow, stretched with ghastly luxuriance toward the sky. The ruptured dome, graven and blackened by its own encrusted ornateness, pushed fatly at the towers that buttressed its enormous weight. Almost against gravity it seemed to hold together, bulging and loose, gawping and precarious to enter.

Sena watched swallows float in and out of Esma’s orifices. They cast fluid shadows over friezes in the walls.

Inside the immense foyer, leaves and twigs shuffled in the gloom. She entered one of the gargantuan rooms that opened off to either side. In the vaulted space, walnuts rotted in the shadows and the floor had been decorated with inlays.

A vague uneasiness smothered everything. Though the designs were striking, hundreds of long sharp-edged lids overshadowed their beauty. Sunk in the foundations, designed as part of Esma’s vast floor plan, over two hundred crypts rested underfoot. Their lids rose, low, oblique and sharp across the spacious floor.

Sena had walked lines from her cottage to this very spot. There were old stories written in the walls of Esma, vague frightening prophecies. But Sena could not afford to be superstitious. She had been desperate. And in desperation she had hidden the Csrym T before stumbling down to find her sisters by the lake. Myhr through Psh, when the weather was typically mild, the Sisterhood could be found in Eloth, delving into the past, unearthing things from the ruins near Ryhd l.⁹ Even so, with the rash of thunderstorms, she had almost missed them.

It was just as well that Caliph hadn’t followed her here. He would have found the ruins empty.

She bent over one of the elegant lids that decorated the floor and pushed. It ground away to reveal a dark trough. The bones inside had dried and long since lost their odor.

She found her pack just where she had left it, crouched in a corner by the yellow feet. She pulled it out, loosening the buckles.

The crimson book slid smoothly into her palms, leather soft and cool against her fingertips.

“Megan’s looking for you,” she whispered to it.

Almost reassuringly, the faint howl that only she could hear floated up onto the moldy draft. Outside, the sky flickered. Thunder rolled like a boulder over the Javneh Mountains and sweet-smelling water began to trickle from cracks a hundred feet overhead.

Sena didn’t give a damn about Megan and her errands. All she wanted was to open the book. And Caliph remained her best chance of that. Now Megan actually wants me stargazing over his shoulder! And I was worried about farn¹⁰at Desdae!

Sena thought about seeing the pages of the Csrym T, covered with Inti’Drou glyphs. Secrets larger than the world, like an infinite opalescent mobile hung above her crib, cutting across and out: away from the planet. Past the sun. Past the blackness.

Sena let herself wallow in anticipation for a moment. Then she stood up and left Esma, walking lines back to the Highlands of Tue.

⁸ I.: The Place of Burning.

⁹ O.S.: Water of Apparitions.

¹⁰ W.: The Betrayal.

CHAPTER 11

Caliph’s week with Mr. Vhortghast had been just what he expected, exhausting, numbing and filled with rancorous, often disconcerting details. He despised being king.

He had seen warehouses filled with qaam-dihet seized from drug lords in Thief Town and Maruchine. Stockpiles of munitions. Gas mines and vitriol bombs laid in the bellies of zeppelins. He had returned to Malgor Hangar for a full tour; seen the armada of brigs and first rates and the only three dreadnoughts in the Duchy of Stonehold, powered by iron sails and mountains of coal and acid.

He had talked with every burgomaster willing to meet, found how each borough squared (as nearly as he could) from the sources at his disposal. He had traveled to every district with the notable exception of Ghoul Court, which (the more he thought about it) seemed less like a borough and more like an independent state.

Caliph had examined tax reports and census reports and toxicity levels from the city well water. He had been shown Bloodsump Lane in all its anathematic squalor under broad daylight without the merciful cover of dark. He had made an appearance at Hullmallow Cathedral for its customary rededication (which happened at the beginning of every High King’s reign) to the multitude of gods worshiped in the seething city and shortly thereafter visited