The Last Page

Was the night air thrashing the trees so fiercely? She could hear her own breathing. Maybe the sexton was playing a trick. Or had that long, high-pitched, inhuman cry been real? A gorgonian scream out in the hills, echoing off the unseen moons?

CHAPTER 31

Under the estate’s mercurial shadows, Sena perched like a lovely daenid reading the Csrym T.

Its pages burst with tumid legends distended out of Sth, rendering minute archaistic details about a place called Jorgill Deep before it had vanished from a highly theoretical, primordial world.

The stories trembled on baby-soft sheets of vellum, sounding in her head with unsettling naivete. They spoke of happy times before Davishok and the Rain of Fire—when black pimplota flowered and dulcet laughter echoed through rampant arches and olden citadels burnished by the sea.

But every page she turned whispered of deceit. Every passing sentence conjured menaces and shadow, dusty races known now to be extinct: Gringlings, Ublisi and Syule.

As Sena read, her eyes filled with vague Yllo’tharnic undulations as great shadows moving under blue. Liquid planets refracted over primeval creatures that hauled themselves beneath the waves in massive pods whose numbers reckoned in the millions.

The Csrym T spoke in myth better than a merchant talked money.

Melancholy verse disgorged images of darkling yellow clouds, winds that howled with voices from the stars. With the turn of a page she leapt to cantos concerning times when tendrils black as plasmic crude rose from seas that were not seas—when mountains shifted at the desert’s edge.

The genealogy of nightmares lay before her. Doomed unspeakable names with magic numbers flecked each page. Nested in old thorny strokes of ink, Sena found Gr-ner Shie: the Faceless One, sleeping while Urebus crawled through his city buried in the Ncrpa.

When at last she lifted her eyes from the page, she felt dazed. The western sky lurked blue and lightless. One hundred eighty degrees from oncoming night, the sinking sun flared from the east and set fire to the western oaks. Their leaves made a bright patchwork of metallic orange against the horizon.

The Csrym T’s howl had dwindled to a gentle whimper like an infant with the croup.

Since the night of the storm, Sena had taken copious notes on the book’s formidable contents. She struggled to draw an outline in her head.

The first section consisted of a preface that had been stitched inside the cover seemingly as an afterthought. Roughly one hundred fifty pages long and written in Dark Tongue, it was from these preface myths that Sena had been struggling to read.

Dark Tongue was a knotty language to decipher, dead as it had been for thousands of years. Like all language it faded inside the parentheses of disuse. Suddenly faced with her lack of practice, Sena now found her mental dictionary maddeningly hard to evoke.

Tired and frustrated, she scanned ahead, gazing in wonder at page after page of Inti’Drou glyphs.

Roughly eight hundred pages of absolute power endowed the heavy tome with a thickness that paralleled her arm.

The glyphs looped on themselves distractingly, formed polysyllables Sena could never hope to pronounce. Insanely abstruse and sometimes displayed with up to five others on the same page, each glyph comprised an unsettling design amalgamated from vague primordial shapes.

The Csrym T was organized so that an entire chapter could usually be viewed with the book lying flat open. Chapters were marked by a curious symbol that formed a break at the beginning and end of each section. There were seldom more than twelve glyphs to a chapter though Sena noticed a few instances of ten, eight and six. On some occasions, five and one glyph comprised entire chapters by themselves.

The authors of the book must not have been concerned about wasting space. In the instances where a solitary glyph embodied one complete chapter that glyph alone was given the room of two entire pages.

To stare at one glyph caused her immediate eye strain while the result of twelve in throbbing black panorama brought the sense of hemorrhage into Sena’s head.

Lesser text accompanied each mark in pulsing thorny strokes, penned in the shadow of the main symbol. This lesser text, like the preface, was written in an abrogate version of Dark Tongue, as bewilderingly sophisticated as it was hopelessly obsolete.

Sena could pick out certain words but she would need other books to decipher the majority of it.

For now, she presumed more than her understanding factually allowed, that the lesser text named and described the power of the Inti’Drou glyph it accompanied and gave directions for a reader’s point of attack—the place where study of the glyph ought to begin.

At the end of the lesser text sat one final symbol, the purpose of which Sena could not derive.

Sena straightened and decided to let the book fall open. Perhaps the habit of some chronic scholar would make one page in particular conspicuous above the rest.

She stood the Csrym T perfectly vertical on its spine and pressed the covers tightly together.

Dramaturgically, she let go.

Infinitesimal moments passed.

Sena watched.

The pages seemed to breathe. They puffed with air, began to fan, forcing the covers apart. A dominant crack appeared in the solid block of vellum, like a fissure forming in a brick. The covers fell. The book toppled.

Page 379.

All around the glyph, in wide-framed margins, there were notations, cramped and written in a crisp endemic hand. The writer had penned them in Old Speech to baffle unschooled eyes.

Sena had no trouble understanding them and devoured them at once. With unreasonable shock she realized Caliph’s uncle had been their author. He even signed them occasionally, like journal entries:

—Nathan H. 543 Y.o.T. Crow.

She found endless cross-references in the notes. Little trails of insight that wound back and forth like the random chewing of a worm. Nearly one-third of the pages had been marked up with Nathaniel’s distinctive hand.

His years of arduous study provided Sena with an extraordinary head start. As she read, she made her own notes in the journal from her pack:

i  The inked portion of each glyph is no more important than the un-inked portion of each glyph. The Gringlings devised a system of compressing information so that each glyph is a double glyph, once in black ink and once in the empty “background ink” of the page.

ii The eyes must be trained to read both the black ink and the “white ink” at the same time.

iii Every curve, angle and line has meaning. Each glyph is a spatial map and the width of strokes reveal numbers and ratios upon being measured. When the glyph is stared at and the mind is drifting, the glyph will seem to move. Extra dimensional (or nonphysical numbers) are evinced when the glyph begins to read the reader and the eyes remained fixed in trance.

iv Mortal vocals, according to the previous owner, are typically incapable of verbalizing the Inti’Drou markings.

v Every glyph contains hundreds of objects and subjects and verbs that correlate back and forth not only within a specific glyph but in relation to the others of any given chapter. Each glyph must be studied in detail. Once