confiscates from diverse libraries and vaults. She will find the way. She will not use wires or jewels because They will give her the set They never gave to me.
I have foreseen it. I am still a Writer and Eater of Time. Yet Their logic eludes me. Why have They chosen her instead of me? Because she is Hjolk-trull? Because They wish to toy with idle irony. Perhaps They laugh in Their dreaming cities in the dark; perhaps They think she will kill herself making the ink.
She will lack the blood to do so.
Perhaps They laugh at the happenstance arrangements of the patterns, of the movements and relationships of men. She will love him. She will kill him for the ink. They could never have wrung such a catastrophe from me.
I care only for my daughter.
The book will tell me of my successor’s arrival. I have put my mark on its pages. When she opens it, I will know.
Yes, you. You: SIENAE IILOOL.
I see your cunning face.
They will write Their runes in your skin and for a time you will try to fight against those strictly metered designs—clabbered in their loveliness. But I know, in the end, you will find them too gluey, too consolidated to work against. The runes will trace your every movement. Your every action will be known to Them. You will give in. And then, my dear, I will return from my far wanderings. I will bargain with you for my daughter’s release.
By the time you read this, it will be too late for you. You may think you can escape without me, but you will be wrong. You will find it in the math. Look. Take all the time you want. You may think I am powerless now. I have no mouth to speak, no blood to draw. But you are wrong.
St. Remora is my mouth.
I can open it. There is an eleventh dial that connects with Them, down below the church, in a womb of vesicated black. It is the trigger of my weapon, my postlude, my ultimatum. Do not tempt me with its use.
On my whim, I can draw the Old Thing out, a Sectua’Gaunt22 still ravenous for souls. When it births into the church, its first thought will kill a hundred thousand people. Its second will kill a hundred thousand more. Souls.
Do you think solvitriol technology was dreamt by man? Invention is reinvention, finding the path that has been found uncounted times before.
I have inherited a diaper-dragging brat along with the house. While it would be convenient in some regards for him to become permanently lost in the mountain woods and thus join his relatives, I have determined that he is a remarkable creature. His father was at least part Hjolk-trull. This means, if nothing else, he is the serendipitous second ingredient (since Gringlings are extinct) for ulian ink! Sad news that we cannot pen the other sheets yet. I am, however, able to begin on the stopping point of our escape, our own little island in the stars—which won’t have to pass the same touchstone as the others. In the meantime, I feed him like a little tick; once he’s swollen with a few more pints he’ll be a fabulous capsule!
She cannot dig me out! She cannot ignore me.
I have been here from the beginning! Not her! I! Me! All of me! In every pathetic fibrous cyst I endured! Me! Who once wept for my lost humanity but now laughs at the stupidity of attempting to … For the sake of what!?
What!
I despise you. All of you. And you will not escape without me. I have laid it into the foundations. You cannot extricate yourself from ME! In the end, I will encompass you and devour you. And you will dissolve slowly across a billion years.
I have fit myself with jewels and darkened them to the moment, bound them to me as I did in the desert. Only this time: this time it will be different.
* * *
THERE was a knock on the door which was good because Caliph felt sick and hollow and dark inside. He couldn’t take any more. He closed the book, pushed himself out of his chair and crossed the room. When he opened the door he was surprised to see the priestess of Nenuln standing there looking better—physically.
He was less surprised to see that she also seemed to be lacking a sense of humor. Her face was pale with terror and Caliph was just about to open his mouth and ask what was wrong when she blurted out, “What in Palan’s name are you reading?”
21G.L.L.: Great Cloud Rift, literally the Crack of the Devourer.
22U.T.: 
.
23Another pseudonym for the unnamed book (the
CHAPTER
29
Sena saw across time. The thing before her was from the sea and it reminded her of Tenwinds.
Pplarian bioengineering, the nautrogienilus with its shell—so like patinated steel—was framed perfectly by the room’s striking white iridescence. It formed a brutish pelagic curl that had been bolted to the floor.
Other echoes of Pplarian shape-crafting had spilled out of the north, squirmed through careless fingers and floor drains into subregions of evolution. They cropped up again in the wild, emerging from bogs and silent tarns.
The monsters.
Smell-feasts, ganglolian and other slippery masses. But this thing with its shell and mollusk flesh, its rich briny stink, took her back to Tenwinds in a visceral and unexpected way.
She could smell the oily ocean, taste the salt again and the fishy wetness that spluttered endlessly. And memories of Tenwinds meant memories of Aislinn.
