The Last Page

the future. Miriam had been expecting repercussions but not so soon, not so violent and random . . . and close. She was the last witch in Stonehold, ignoring her own admonition.

“Where is the book?” she hissed into her captive’s ear, trying to ignore the horrifying results of her equation.

“Book? What book? I’m just a mechanic—”

Miriam pulled back on the bladed collar around his neck just enough that it broke the skin. “You know what I mean,” she whispered. “I want the Red Book. I want the Csrym T.”

Normally the Wllin Droul could not be bought or tortured, but this thin-blooded specimen was different. He was close to human, enough that he could be intimidated through violence.

“You are alone,” Miriam whispered, “with a Shrdnae Witch.” Her words had a visible effect, ending an assortment of possible games he might have otherwise played. He broke immediately.

“We ain’t got it—yet.”

“Yet? Then you must know who has it or where it is.”

She continued to back him away from the disquieting scene by the engine. The equation had resolved, died down like an over-boiling pot.

The first man was dead. It could no longer be determined where his body ended and the machine began. The smell of burnt hair and flesh was catching up to them, flowing outward from the point of violence.

“It’s comin’ to Isca Castle,” muttered the man. His own blood was wet and sticky on his neck. Miriam took him behind the tall movable rack toward the tank she had landed on when she had first entered the brewery. She stopped.

“Don’t make me ask for the rest,” she breathed.

“It’s comin’ with a girl. That’s all I know. I don’t know when or how. Sometime soon. We’re getting ready. We don’t know where it’s comin’ from. It’s just comin’. That’s all. That’s all, I swear.”

“Does the girl have a name?”

“Something with an S I think. They said Sauna or Sara. Something like that. I’m a crawler. They don’t tell me shit. You know that!”

Miriam scowled. Her heart cooled. She bit her lip as her mind began to work.

“Think harder. I need a name. If you can remember all the parts to that engine I’m sure you can remember a simple name.”

“I told you. It’s with an S. That’s all I know. It’s like Sema or Suana. I don’t fucking know!”

His distress was genuine, on the brink of being pathetic. But his last attempt had solidified a gut-turning hunch in Miriam’s stomach, something that sickened her at the same time that it gave her hope.

“Was it Sena?”

“Yeah, that’s it.” The man coughed. “I swear I ain’t just playing along. That’s the name I heard. How did you—?”

He dropped to his knees, relinquished from the deadly hold. There was the sound of something landing lightly on top of the tank, then the spring of the metal as it retook its original shape.

By the time the man turned around, Miriam had vanished through the same window she had come through and was running full-out down the alley, turning onto Seething Lane, sprinting down the cobbles, heading for home.

The man swore softly and touched his throat, beginning to formulate a story. Something simple, something he could remember if he was asked to retell it exactly, many times in a row.

When Miriam reached her flat in Maruchine she mounted the iron steps to her window in a winded flurry. She had left the casement open. Cool night air lapped past the tattered curtains, sinking the darkened apartment to a reclusive, somehow impolite temperature.

Miriam had never used the small coal-burning stove that tottered in the corner. She struck a match and lit an oil lamp. Orange light scraped over uneven plaster, revealing a room as exhausted as Miriam after her two-mile run.

She didn’t want to believe that Sena had somehow found the Csrym T. It seemed preposterous that Megan’s protege could have discovered it and kept it secret when there were so many eyes looking for it, scouring the Hinterlands from here to Yorba.

Maybe Megan had planned it. Maybe she had found the book and given it to Sena to hide and reveal at some later time. A maneuver that would ensure Sena’s ascension to the tunsia circlet of Coven Mother.

No. Megan could not be trusted. Not with this particular information.

The realization filled Miriam with fear. She grew sick to think that she was going behind the Coven Mother’s back. But she had to be sure. She had to treat the man’s words as though they might be true, as though there were no other women named Sena in the north.

Miriam pondered the man she had interrogated. It was always difficult to tell, but she guessed he had told her the truth as far as he knew it. He was a weak link in the Cabal’s chain now. If his own order did not discover his treachery, she might return to him, find him again and extract additional information. It was no danger to leave him alive.

Between a dark cage and a ramshackle sideboard cluttered with bottles, Miriam adjusted the lamp flame and penned a hasty note in Withil, using miniscule letters to conserve space on the tiny roll. In it, she warned of all she had learned, the implications and the fact that the Duchy had been evacuated. All the Sisters that could, had gone through Menin’s Pass into Miryhr.

Then she rolled the tiny scroll tightly and pressed it into a leather tube.

She opened the cage. Its bottom had been lined with yesterday’s newspaper, headlines still shouting with idiot urgency: HIGH KING’S FATHER MURDERED! MISKATOLL TO BLAME!

Two-thirds of the city had rallied around their new king with news of the assassination. In a twisted political way, his father’s death had been a stroke of luck for Caliph Howl.

Gently, she lifted the cage’s occupant out into the lamplight. She snapped the tube to a permanent clip around the pigeon’s leg and then removed a hood that kept the bird blind and quiet.

The pigeon’s head had been altered ruthlessly. Its left eye glowed with green chemiostatic fluid that powered a series of small clockwork devices buried in the creature’s brain. The feathers had been hacked away at the top of the skull; a square patch of bone was revealed, screwed with a little tin.

Miriam drew a triangular piece of metallic mineral from one of the bottles with a tweezers and set it in a similarly shaped socket in the tin. She pressed it down hard with her thumb until it snapped into place.

The bird shook its head as though infested with parasites. Some itch in its brain that would never resolve.

The cruestone would alter the bird’s path; take it to the tower of parliament’s Eighth House, to the rookery of Giganalee’s discreet hand.

Miriam walked to the window and flung the bird into the night air. The cruestone would goad it; complete a circuit through the cruel device in its head that fired electricity into its brain. It would prevent it from resting. It would whip it relentlessly toward its destination in the Country of Miryhr, tiny wires like fiery worms burrowing into what little consciousness it had left.

Miriam hoped she had done the right thing; that if the information she had been given was false, her sense of practicality would be recognized and her disregard for hierarchy overlooked.

If what she had learned was true, only Giganalee could be trusted, only the Eighth House would know what to do. But Miriam understood the risk she had taken.

In case she had miscalculated, her hopes were false. There would be no lenience for operating behind the Coven Mother even with the good of the Sisterhood in mind. Her conduct would be seen as betrayal and faithlessness to Megan’s rule.

As Miriam listened to the sound of the pigeon’s wings beat into the filthy night, she turned slowly and began to gather up her things.

¹⁵ U.T. Approximate pronunciation: “! sh !” (! indicates bilabial or dental clicks, epiglottal plosives and other nonstandard sounds).