The Last Page

The steps were monumental. Wide and curved to embrace the contour of the mountain, as though the mountain itself had been set on a vast dais. At the back of the topmost terrace, burrowed into the mountainside, the Halls yawned.

Sena could already hear them. Miles of deep vaulted corridor honeycombed the Ghalla Peaks; few were unexplored but their depth precluded frequent visitations. Many now found use as wine cellars or crypts for the wealthy. The Halls were another leftover from the Groull.

Sena moved quickly and soundlessly, scrambling up each of the six-foot steps. Listening to the ominous breathing of the mountain.

When she reached the top she turned and glanced briefly out over the city. Its weltering rooftops and chimney pots formed an eerie black landscape of smoke and domes. Beyond them, through a deep cleft in the Ghalla Peaks, the smoky glimmer of Miryhr’s dusk-burnished lakes still smoldered under leagues of mist.

Sena watched the friendly red lights of taverns and inns flickering with drunken abandon. Behind her, the sheer face of the mountain rose skyward and the low moan of the Halls waited.

She turned and walked along them, unsure of her exact position. Beyond the huge openings, colossal columns jutted mightily from the walls, supporting far-flung ornate ceilings with inconceivable designs. The floors, though smooth for the most part, ran in almost imperceptible rises and slopes of limestone tile. Sena felt a steady gush of warm damp air as she stood near one of the many hundred openings that lined the top of the Great Steps.

Inside, the smallest sounds echoed. Water drops. Even wind. A black shape shifted in the darkness and her hand clutched instinctively at Robert’s sword.

“ ‘S’me lady.” A raised palm came out into the starlight as though from behind a curtain.

“Gavin?”

“Yes. ‘S’me.” The voice of the guide she had hired sounded ridiculous as it reverberated through the empty vault. He was Worian but even Trade Tongue exited rough and half-formed from his mouth. She wondered briefly how he had made his way past the guards.

“Show me quickly,” she whispered.

He stood up and brushed off his backside. He looked small and formless, as though a diaper bunched beneath his trousers.

“No light until we are far enough inside,” he said.

She followed his footsteps for several hundred feet. When the starlight vanished, the Halls grew unnaturally dark. The air felt pulpy and damp. Gavin produced a book of matches but had trouble getting them to strike. Each spluttering blue streak that snapped ineffectually along the book hiked Sena’s tension. Would the matches run out? What the fuck was he doing wrong? She counted six tries in the palpable blackness before the candle box finally fluttered to life.

Muttering to himself, Gavin swung the light around and tromped off into the mountain without saying a word. Along the first leg of their journey, Sena noticed more recent stonework. Niches had been carved and then mortared shut, sealed off with marble slabs graven with dates, names and short serious poems.

Gavin guided her through immense passageways that turned back and forth, all of them generally sloping down. Fallen slabs of rock and ribbing lay like scattered bones and an occasional pilaster, loosened by shifts in the mountain and eons of seeping moisture lay sprawled out, having relinquished its lifelong marriage to the wall.

“This way,” Gavin whispered. Sena was timing their pace on her watch. She flipped it open again, chemiostatic fluid flaring like an emerald in her palm. She squinted at the chronometer. They had traveled nearly two and a half miles into the mountain.

Gavin’s breathing was loud and nasal as though he were growing excited or fearful. Sena followed the dirty yellow bob in his hand another thousand feet, judging a slow but steady descent the entire way.

Neither of them talked.

Finally, though the wide chilly tunnel ran on, Gavin stopped.

“It starts right around here, mostly on the far wall. I want my money before we go any farther.” He looked like a blind mole in the rake of light.

Sena tousled her hair. “A little pushy, aren’t you?”

“I brought you here. Now I want my money. Maybe I’ll leave you here in the dark.”

Reluctantly she unbuckled her pack, fished then tossed him a prepared pouch that clinked when he caught it.

Gavin opened it and scrutinized the contents.

“This way.” He swung the lantern around and stumped toward the far wall. The carvings materialized slowly, picked out by candlelight.

“No one knows they are here but me, maybe. Maybe some others too, I don’t know. No one can read them.”

Sena crouched and gazed at the ancient writing. Few can read them, she amended silently.

A week before the attack at her cottage, Sena had found a reference in the Holthic Scripture, supposedly a translation of a Gringling text made by Yacob Skie before he released his prophetic Roll of Years.¹¹ One of the clues that originally began her search for the Csrym T, the Holthic Scripture also referenced “unholy vaults below the mountains at Nifol” as containing script regarding the “Red Book.” Sena hoped to find the script, if it existed, and learn more before attempting the books’s anathematic lock.

Talk with the stonemasons’ guild led her to this man, Gavin, who had interred many of Sandren’s newer additions to the stockpile of wealthy dead.

“Few know the Halls like Gavin,” the guild master had said, “because few spend as much time in them as he does.”

The dead languages Sena had learned at school whipped up in her head. Each one poised, ready to dissect the rich field of carvings Gavin’s light pored over.

The carvings rose up the wall and down the passage out of sight. Sena recognized them as a form of Jingsade Runic Script, mingled with phoneticized spellings of what strangely seemed to be Mllic glyphs.

It was an exceptional mix.

Jingsade Runes were indigenous to locales surrounding the Great Cloud Rift; there was nothing strange about finding them here. But Mllic glyphs were found only on the isles and in desolate seaside ruins along the southern coasts—never this far inland.

She would need rubbings to take back to her cottage for further study. So engrossed had she become, she barely heard the light grate of metal behind her.

Suddenly, Gavin hurled himself like a block snapped loose from a scaffold crane. As she turned, Sena felt what must have been a long heavy knife strike her shoulder at an angle and glance off the studs of the watchman’s jacket.

She fumbled for her sword, Robert’s sword, and tried to parry, but Gavin was too close. Head down, pressing her against the wall. His knife slashed gainlessly against her rib cage, unable to penetrate the jacket’s heavy leather.

Instinctively she brought her knee up, heard his jaw snap shut with a loose-toothed crunch. A muffled yelp echoed off the carvings and a second plunge of the knife struck the wall just left of her torso.

Gavin smelled of grease and dust. He was small but compact. His weight made her stagger. She felt herself being dragged down and couldn’t tell where his knife was. Her fear had given way to anger. Not this. Not again. She brought her knee up once more, this time striking nothing but air.

But Gavin stumbled backward holding his face. Apparently her first blow had done more damage than she thought.

In the tilted light she could see him swagger like the flame. For a moment it looked like he might give up, then suddenly he lunged again, apparently unaware of Robert’s sword.

Almost with the motion of a dance step Sena caught him on the steel. His knees buckled. The thick hard fingers that had worked years of stone did grasping motions. With hardly a sound, he fell to the floor.

Sena kicked the knife from his hand. He still breathed in a gurgling fashion.