The Last Page

l:href='#_3.jpg'/>n. I’m sure you—”

“I’m not using him,” said Sena hotly. Her anger was real. “Go back to Skellum. Send a qloin if you like. I’m not coming back.”

Sena crept forward. By the time Miriam had turned around again, Sena stood in full view at the edge of the untilled field, glaring. The sight forced Miriam to take several steps back.

Sena walked forward. Careless. Unafraid. Miriam stumbled.

“This is my country, now,” said Sena.

Miriam looked surprised, like she had lost her train of thought. There was not enough blood on Sena’s finger for her to use.

“Tell the Sisterhood I am my own witch. Tell them I intend to stay here.”

“The hex—”

“Does it look like my holomorphy is suffering? I will break Megan’s hex. I will bind what stones remain. I will patch the holes Gr-ner Shie is floundering through. I will undo this thing. I am not your Sister anymore.”

Apparently Miriam had nothing to say. Maybe she even believed that Sena wasn’t bluffing, that she was capable of doing all the things she said.

“You have it then . . . ?” Miriam whispered in reverential awe. “You’ve found it?”

Sena gave a crooked smile. “Found what, grda?”

Miriam trembled. “The book. The book for binding gods.”

Sena hesitated. There was danger in being overly sure. If she admitted, if she confessed, the Sisterhood would send more than a single qloin. She hadn’t even opened it. Confirming Miriam’s accusation would be folly, so she demurred.

“If I had the Csrym T why would I bother hiding from you?”

Miriam’s face revealed an inner struggle with the logic Sena posed. She seemed to hang between two presumptions as Sena backed her down the road.

Sena stopped. She raised her arm and pointed her sickle at the other woman’s heart.

“Leave Stonehold . . . while you can. .²¹”

At the sound of the Unknown Tongue, patterns of darkness rolled over the ground like clouds covering up the sun. Sena had split her finger open again by discreetly tugging her thumb along the tip of her knife.

The limited illusion that she chose was that her body turned into shadows, blending with the patterns on the ground.

A semisolid darkness remained in the place where she had been, holding Miriam’s eyes fixed while Sena darted south into the field by the road.

Miriam was left to catch her breath in the aftermath of the well-wrought glamour. For the first time in her life, she respected Sienae Iilool. Up until today she had never squared off against Megan’s girl. She had never seen firsthand the precision with which Sena wielded the Unknown Tongue.

Any witch could throw a glamour and adjust its output with different numbers in a string. Flaws in the glamour happened when the equation got cluttered with variables that hadn’t been properly reduced. It was the difference between saying something loquaciously and keeping it succinct.

Brevity made a glamour urgent, lucid and exact. Wordy castings added ambiguity and room for doubt.

Sena’s had been exquisitely efficient, pared to the bone, fitted precisely to flex the muscle of a particular effect. Her illusion preyed on Miriam’s mind. She was held in thrall by the sudden fleeting shadows and Sena’s meteoric evacuation of the road. Like a murder of crows had been wheeling overhead, the shadows on the road wove and flickered. The grasses bent in a sudden gust. A menacing black shape hung for a moment, a Sena-shaped daemon in the air.

After the glamour passed, Miriam realized her heart was pounding in her chest. Yes. She respected Megan’s protege intractably now. Sena’s voice filled the weeds with threatening whispers.

The day was young. There couldn’t be a better time.

Miriam turned southwest, quickening her pace, and headed directly for Menin’s Pass.

Sena darted through the field, making for higher ground, putting as much distance between herself and Miriam as she could in the time her glamour allowed.

After a sweaty and difficult climb she reached a second dirt road from which she could look down across striated crops and solitary farms. In vast breathless panorama she saw the Greencap Mountains reaching north, High Horn floating in a distant haze and Isca smoldering quietly at the edge of the sea.

The road she had reached wound among the foothills of the Healean Range. The mountain woods leaned out like scaffolding from the precipitous incline to the south, threatening to fall across her path. Above them the Healean Mountains soared next to vertical, a harsh savage escarpment of serrated stone.

Sena recognized an approach a quarter mile to the east where a rutted trail turned uphill into the woods. It was the same trail Caliph and she had ridden many weeks before: the trail to the ruined Howl Estate.

Still shaken from her confrontation, Sena glanced behind her. When she reached the shady tunnel it provided marginal relief. Dappled light floated over the disused path. The trees muttered, boughs creaking.

After little more than ten minutes she reached the yard. The house sat, pouting hatefully amid a riot of weeds.

Sena felt a powerful aversion to the windows. It seemed abnormal that children had not hiked up here, thrown stones and broken the innumerable panes. As she began her circuit of the property, from the corner of her eye, she imagined movement in the glass, at any given window, but every time she turned, there was nothing there.

The building was a motley, mortared, pitted mess. The walls heaved up with obeliscal angles that veered imperceptibly as they wrestled with the sky. Like a fortress or a gate, the hulking structure gave Sena a strong impression that it was holding back untold things, plugging a defect or a wound in space, bulging slightly from decades of strain.

Sena worked her way behind the house, passing through a rusted iron fence. Amid the elms, mourning cloaks fluttered near the statues in the vines. High-pitched, late summer insects echoed off the stones, screaming an alarm.

This is the spot, she decided. I’ll build the monument right here. She kicked at the weeds tentatively, gauging the amount of work it would take to clear a spot of ground. She emptied the few stones she had collected from her pack.

It would take many trips for her to be ready by the first of Thay.

Although she had no desire to enter the house, she spent the afternoon surveying the extensive property of the estate. She found several property markers in the trees a hundred yards behind the gazebo.

When the sky turned gold she headed back to Isca. Fantastic fears followed her all the way from the yard.

Only when she reached the tertiary road that dwindled through the foothills did her phantom pursuers leave off. They were invisible. But she could feel them staring at her from the shadows of Howl Lane.

Figments, she mused, tousling her hair.

Sena made it to the castle just before curfew as the gatehouse bells were ringing. She hurried across into the tunnel and took a coach to the keep where Gadriel admitted her at the foyer and offered to take her pack. He mentioned that Caliph had already gone to bed.

Tired and sticky from the day’s exertions, Sena headed upstairs, longing for a bath. She met Cameron on the steps.

“Evening.” He smiled.

“Evening.” Sena smiled back. “You look like you’re leaving.”

Cameron shrugged. “Yes. I think it’s time I went back to Nifol . . . to my wife. Autumn’s almost here. I don’t want to get trapped in the snow.”

“You could take a zeppelin . . . or . . . I guess not.” She had momentarily forgotten Saergaeth ruled the west.

“Hate flying.” He smiled.

“You’ll take breakfast with us in the morning?”