The Last Page

that glyph is fully understood, the next may be attempted and so on until the entire chapter has been read. Then the chapter must be studied as a whole, finding the meaning in the spaces between and the correlations behind and between every glyph to every other glyph.

vi It is obvious from Nathan’s notes that he believed any single glyph subsumed a relative holomorphic gradation of power which he states is “. . . on scale with the creation or destruction of worlds.”

Sena set her notes aside.

Now, instead of constant howling, she felt nauseous. She realized that the glyphs in the Csrym T were so complex that singular structures of thought might take days or weeks to understand. They formed impossible pictures and indescribable movements behind her eyes. The solid surging marks, she didn’t doubt, might cause blindness.

Sena looked, captured a glyph and closed her eyes to study it.

There’s enough here to study three Hjolk-trull lifetimes, maybe more. She felt like a child reading for the first time, sounding it out in her head (since her vocals were of little use), trying to understand the academese of gods.

She had barely scratched the surface and already there were mysterious threads to follow, like one curious passage in the preface myths that spoke of the Last Page and that seemed to coincide with the rubbings she had taken from the Halls below Sandren.

She couldn’t make anything of it:

“And the Last Page will be written before Quietus comes.”

Sena felt momentarily silly as she stared at the words with profound reverence. Literal believers in even the most ensconced religions were fading.

According to the Herald, the congregation at Hullmallow Cathedral had dwindled; not because the organ’s freakish stack of organic pipes (that twisted and splayed across the walls and ceiling like variegated trachea) had frightened them away.

Rather, the newest religion in the north was a revival of monotheism: the worship of self. There was no guarantee of purchasing friends or love or fame or happiness but hawkers sold facsimiles at a fairly going clip. As a result in the city, varietal masturbation sold far, far better than sex.

She folded her notes and closed the Csrym T, putting the great block of vellum in her pack. She dropped from the low oak in which she had been sitting. As she paced Nathaniel’s yard, fallen leaves made chewing sounds beneath her feet.

Worry consumed her.

Now she understood the trap that Nathaniel Howl had written about in the margins, the one he claimed to have chuckled ruefully over when he discovered it decades ago. And now, she guessed, it had claimed another victim who was just as inattentive to the antithetical drollery of whatever cosmic powers had created the lock.

Quite simply, there was no way to open the Csrym T’s lock without succumbing to its curse.

It was a simple conditional, like those learned in logic philosophy at Desdae when students were faced with categorical syllogisms and the prospect of memorizing the square of opposition: if true love cannot be betrayed then betrayed love cannot be true.

Sena’s hunt for the required ingredients had been a hunt for a beast that never breathed.

The trap’s simplicity was also its genius.

Only a truly impassive heart would not revolt at the cost of opening the book. Only a power-hungry zealot could accept the fulsome ritual as a tolerable exchange. And only those deserving a cryptic fate would not see the blatant incongruity demanded by the recipe.

Fear tickled the heel of Sena’s every waking thought.

Even the pleasant autumn evening seemed sinister and intelligent, as though the world had come alive, the ground hunkering underfoot, the air watching her. Any moment Sena expected calamity, black skies, roaring winds . . . more tremors in the mountains.

She looked toward Isca. The castle towers rose like golden needles by the sea.

Standing below the oak, she tried to decide whether to flee Stonehold before winter came or . . .

“Yella byn!”

She spat the words in frustration.

Slowly the idea crept into her skull that maybe, just maybe, she had deceived herself.

Do I love him?

If I do, why now? Why now after the book is open?

She cursed again, then laughed at the mounting absurdity of her emotions.

How prosaic! She got what she wanted only when she no longer needed it.

Her humor covered the spiteful truth. She wanted to see Caliph. She wanted to tell him what she had found in the book, share her tiny discoveries thus far. She wanted to talk to him and feel his arms around her.

The guards would never let her back into the castle. Even if they did, she knew Caliph would be done with her.

She mucked around in the leaves, holding her pack in crossed arms; she had a full contingency of traveling supplies.

The wind seemed to panic her hair. Ignited by the setting sun, her unruly curls tossed this way and that against the dark western sky, a pantomime of the war going on inside her head.

With a final angry curse, Sena kicked savagely at the leaves and began walking down the hill.

CHAPTER 32

Caliph’s wound scabbed over.

On the fourth of Kam he sat in the high tower eating a fish and pickle salad sandwich. After sampling a side of crisped potatoes, he morosely pushed the plate away and reached down under his pant cuff to discreetly wipe his fingers on his sock.

The chef, with what he had to work with, had outdone himself but Caliph’s appetite remained anemic. He had begun, for the second time, the painful effacing of her memory, the chiseling off of tokens that had snarled with surprising complexity in his brain.

At some future place or time (perhaps) the reduction of her image would obtain and something else be fashioned from the rubble left behind.

He would have dismissed his struggle as parody in anyone else. If this weren’t happening to him he would have curled his lip. But she had found a hairline fracture that caused something inside him, something indefinable, to fail. If it hadn’t been her . . .

If it had been anyone but her . . .

His mind toyed with options lodged in preposterous subrealities, masochistic cognitive abortions—games of “what if” staged in excruciating futility.

And yet he played.

Alani entered the high tower exactly on time.

Caliph could see Alani read his mood: somewhere between coal and cellar black. Caliph made it vanish with a ruffle, like a tablecloth pulled under dishes by sleight of hand. The tense angular lines relaxed, faded.

Caliph bid his spymaster sit.

He was risking everything with this meeting, trusting that unlike everyone else, Alani wouldn’t let him down.

Graffiti covered the gates to the Hold. The police were terrified. The markets were dead. It was time to unveil his plan.

Yrisl had been skeptical. It relied on surreal improbabilities. Grand orchestration. Perfect timing. It relied on variables that couldn’t be nailed down. It relied on murder, deception, cruelty and chance in order to succeed. It relied on greed and arrogance and, in the end, made the handful of murdered street youth seem like an easily