The Last Page

carefully. She knew her belongings could be rifled at any moment.

The great hypostyle of Deep Cloister sat inside the enormous courtyard made by parliament’s wings. Deep Cloister was a circular collection of pillars holding up a slightly conical roof.

Sena wove inward through the columns. They were positioned in such a way that no clear line of sight extended to the interior and even daylight choked after forty yards.

Thorn apples grew in profusion throughout Miryhr and the Sisterhood had gathered leaves earlier that day. Now they boiled them, brewing a drink that promoted visions.

Some had already become sick. Others laughed and ran screaming that they were flying and that the darkness above the columns had dissolved into sky—a sky that flamed and spiraled with brilliant sinister hues of green.

Sena sipped the beverage shoved into her hands and made her way to the center where Megan was already calling loudly from atop a dais of ashen slate.

The Sisterhood responded with unified shrieks of holomorphic formulae. Though the cacophony must have floated far above parliament and filled the streets of Skellum with terrifying echoes, whatever dissidents might have heard stayed well away.

“Tonight we call on the Faceless One.” Megan’s frail voice lifted from the dais. She held an ornate staff of metal and bone, riddled with tubules and hoses and bundles of wire.

Ghastly and slender, the staff glistered. Tiny gem-like windows revealed its center was filled with chemiostatic fluid. From a distance it looked like glowing chrysoprase decorated its grotesque length.

It was not a Shrdnae implement. This thing had come out of the south. Out of Iycestoke, thought Sena. Or more likely Pandragor itself.

Wires trailed from the staff’s base across the dais to an arcane machine comprised of coils of ydellium tubing that phosphoresced faintly, drawing energy from shifting mile-thick slabs of atmosphere.

Like a gruesome mechanized god, the bulky creation produced strange arbitrary sounds: ticks, knocks and creaks as the fluid that filled the tubing expanded or contracted. Tiny valves occasionally exhaled uncanny spurts of vapor, pouring a pastel shroud of halitus out and down across the dais, cloaking Megan’s feet in icy tendrils.

Like a tuning fork, the staff had begun to hum, the blades of bone to resonate and slice through air somehow thick as cooking fat. Maybe it was just the thorn apple drink. Sena set hers on the floor and watched in fascination from beside one of the ubiquitous columns.

Megan was speaking in the Unknown Tongue.

Sena’s throat went dry as the numbers behind the words and the meaning behind the numbers rose in a distorted spiral through the displaced roof and into the sky.

The tuning staff sang an oscillating, bone-shivering sweetness, a keen, a razor cutting, a howl, a bone- shattering sledge, a feather tickling. The sound induced spasms, sudden vivid nightmares that Sena could never after describe.

As Megan raised her staff, the throng of witches poured blood, the Sisterhood’s own blood, into the argument. Hemofurtum . . . but willingly, consciously.

The Unknown Tongue poured from the assemblage, fortifying the math:

“”¹⁶

Witches jackknifed, clutched their stomachs. They vomited blackness. What came out of their mouths did not hit the floor but purled upward like ink gouts in water. Winding skyward. Imbuing the spinning green clouds.

Convulsive twitching gripped their bodies, arrhythmic shudders that sucked from inside their chests. Their arms, legs and heads flailed like marionettes. A surreal paroxysm of extraordinary violence.

The very substance of space and dimension quailed, undulated, air sluggish now and even thicker, like sewage. Like curdled milk. Rippling and heaving. Solids bled into vapor. Vapor solidified. Liquids became plasmodia—mobile and sentient. The stone columns began to seep into the sky, drooling up like candles melting from the bottom, gravity reversed.

Sena tried to flee but the air rebuked her, heavy and suffocating. Warm pudding. Her arms lengthened. Melting candy. Honey drizzled across the vacant roof.

She clutched a column. It was cool and empty. She fell inside and tumbled up its vacuous length. Not stone. Soluble as gas. Maybe she was vapor. Maybe she didn’t exist at all.

The tuning staff’s wavelengths broadened, as though its own substance were being altered, vibrating at a lower frequency. She couldn’t hear it anymore. She could feel it.

Shut it off! she thought. You stupid fucking beldam! Shut it off! She staggered into pudding again, somersaulted through a thicket of black empty columns.

As if in answer to her unspoken demand, there was the faint sound of stone shivering from hundreds of miles or alternate dimensions away. Something came apart beneath a sonic blow. Shards blew. Ricocheted off walls and underground passageways.

Then the machine faltered and the tubing on the staff broke loose under enormous pressure, frequency, vibration, sound, hoses whipping. They left wakes of vapor like white millipedes in air.

Sena couldn’t see it except during the split instant when the air returned to normal and the Sisterhood fell to the ground. The women’s retching ended as pillars reverted to solid stone. Sena had made it out of the hypostyle.

But in the real world, the summer breeze had grown thick and cold like it sometimes did by the Porch of Sth, like the black nitrous air in the Halls below Sandren.

The clouds over the hypostyle were spinning in a tight whorl and the huge columns shone with ghastly, almost invisible halos.

Sena had to crouch against the wind or be blown over. As she fought, a fetid reek began to fill her lungs. Electricity pulsed overhead. Her robe shredded along strange geometric lines, like paper torn along a crease. She realized her boots were lost, possibly entombed forever in one of the columns, only when her bare foot came down on something cold and wet. Sena saw a salamander lying in the grass.

Its wet skin flickered in the nearly constant lightning, looking pale and ghastly. Its head was crushed open and it stank. Slapping noises struck down all around her in the grass. Frogs, salamanders, even fish falling from the sky.

Screams lost in the storm. Women running this way and that. Some curled into balls in the grass, arms thrown over their heads.

Hail.

A blast of wind picked Sena up and dragged her over the lawn. She clawed her way just lee of a garden statue, listening to the faint tinkle of breaking windows overhead.

Great white chunks of ice bounced in the lawn, seeming to pop up out of the ground. One of the hailstones struck a girl in the shoulder. They are falling. All of them . . . are falling.

This is a transumption hex. Using numbers. Taking Gr-ner Shie: the Faceless One, from one place? To another? Sundered distant stones. Stars that form a prison. Far beyond the Ncrpa.

I am drugged.

I am falling.

¹⁶ U.T. Approximate pronunciation: “Quem sah-aydl-ntah hkdlim!”

INTERLUDE

The Key

There are legends that fabulize the first time the Csrym Tlocked itself, just after Davishok and the Rain of Fire. Sena reads them at Desdae. She discovers how the Tamaraith, that legendary Ublisi, was forced to unseal her own book in the