The Last Page

by Anthony Huso

  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 aftermath of a terrible disaster. A terrible mistake.

  While the pipes from the boiler stir Caliph’s dreams she examines an unusual account from a general turned historian who lived nearly a century ago. In it, he provides his own translation of inscriptions he supposedly found in the Jungles of hloht that tell how darkness came to Sth. He can’t present the carvings to the ISSA,17he says, because they were lost along with most of his gear in a Veyden ambush.

  No one takes him seriously.

  A week of ridicule in scientific journals ends with the mass murder of a sect of priests that investigators say financed his expeditions. He flees back to the jungles and though pursued, is never apprehended.

  Sena glosses the cutting and turns to another of the man’s manuscripts which details (again by unsubstantiated translations) the Csrym T’s lock. She skips halfway down the page.

  “. . . Last inscription makes it sound like a woman at a restaurant checking the time, waiting for the man that never comes. With disuse it withdraws into sulking; it has to be coaxed again with a sign of fidelity, a sign of unwavering commitment. Because there is no key.”

  There has never been a key, reads Sena. Nor are the lock’s tumblers rusted from neglect. They are rusted from use
. According to his account, which Sena copies word for word, the holomorphic lock drinks blood.

  It is bizarre. And it gets worse, a bathetic bit of recipe seemingly concocted by someone who knows nothing about real holomorphy.

  Sena laughs when she reads it.

  It is sentimental garbage. She begins to side with the general’s critics. He is a sham, a homicidal huckster selling trinkets from the jungle.

  But then she reads the other clipping.

  A story from a journalist out of Stonehold whose story had been republished in an anthology. It recounted a woman’s complaint, filed sixty-one years before, about a man, her lover, who had assaulted her, cut her. Sena is captivated. The dates, the names of those implicated cross-reference easily with something else she knows: the only account of the last person to open the Csrym T.

  She goes back to the general’s recipe and copies it precisely. Her mind is spinning.

  In the darkened library something besides Caliph’s breathing makes noise, a sudden itching in her ear. She turns but there is nothing.

  Sena re-reads what she has copied.

  1 ampoule of thy true love’s blood taken by theft.

  1 ampoule of thy own blood taken with silver.

  1 hunk of dead man’s hair taken only in spring or autumn time.

  1 ampoule of water blest in the church of Thool.

  2 leaves of Trindixahht and meat of the tantun nut.

  A strange argument follows whose numbers, even to Sena, make little sense. She has read it many times since Desdae. Its meaning has grown. She recognizes part of it now as a form of hemofurtum. She carries it in her pack with the Csrym T.

  The morning after the hex, she washes the black out of her hair and leaves Skellum. The Sisterhood is in disarray. Megan is ill, sleeping with a smell-feast. Sena tells Haidee she is going to Stonehold to spy on the High King in accordance with Megan’s wishes.

  No one argues or tells her it is unsafe.

  Haidee arranges for an electric cab to take her as far as Jyn Hêl.18The starlines there will take her to Stonehold.

  From her tower window, Giganalee watched Sena go. She had not approved of Megan’s decision to sell a transumption hex to Pandragor. Such holomorphy was unpredictable and Giganalee felt certain that the Pandragonians could not even fully understand what they were buying. It would make Stonehold forever dangerous as the effects of the hex seeped through time. The Duchy would be beaten repeatedly, at random intervals, as if by a blind giant wielding a maul. The devastation would be indiscriminate and unprecedented. Regardless of misgivings, her duty to the Sisterhood was to advise, not control. The Eighth House did not engage in politics.

  Giganalee trudged across the room and sat in her throne like a dead thing, claws clutching velvet armrests, head balanced like a skull, trying to see into Sena’s future.

  Hours passed. The Eighth House did not sleep while she dreamt of red skies and death. She could not catch the shapes, could not pause them in their flight. They soared like scarlet clouds across the murrey pitch, recreant shapes wheeling to turn south; they tried to get away. They were hideous and malevolent as they scooted before the weather, fleeing something far more ominous.

  All at once, Giganalee’s eyes opened.

  The sallow, oily light of dawn slipped through the windows, shearing off around the shape of a bird.

  Giganalee dragged a broken tooth across the back of her hand, tearing skin like tissue. She muttered in the Unknown Tongue as her blood broke through the fragile, liver-spotted flesh.

  The pigeon came to her, charmed.

  It was ugly and in poor health, ragged from mountain winds and weather. It had not been as fast as the Pandragonian albatross that had delivered word of Mr. Amphungtl’s failed negotiations.

  Giganalee clutched it and carried it to her workbench like a piece of wood. She laid it on its belly, forcing the legs down. With her other hand she pulled a jeweler’s screwdriver from a rack of delicate tools.

  Using the flat edge she pried the cruestone from the socket in its skull and dropped it into a bottle on the nearby shelf. Then she flipped the bird over on its back and, with a pair of tweezers, pulled the coiled message like a clock spring from its housing.

  Her eyes were old and cloudy. Her collection of ornate magnifying glasses lay scattered throughout the room. She shoved the bird into an enormous cage and locked the door.

  When she found a lens, she studied Miriam’s note under the ochre window light, reading the miniscule Withil with ease. Then she stuffed the paper into her mouth and chewed it to paste, swallowing it like a lump of phlegm. She laid her glass on a small stand near her chair and frowned.

  Miriam had done right. She was brave. Brave enough to be Coven Mother someday. Yet Giganalee faltered in her thoughts. After all, it was too much to believe.

  How could she have missed it? How could the Eighth House not have seen? If the book had been with Sienae, it had been in Skellum, within parliament’s walls!

  How could she not have felt it? How could she not have known?

  Giganalee felt fear trickle through her iron insides, cold and unfamiliar. There must be some mistake. Sena could not have found the book. Or could she?

  The Eighth House had read legends of the book hiding when it did not want to be found. Giganalee retreated to her chair and uncoiled the tubing from her hookah. She lit it and sucked long cool tendrils of smoke through the water. The facets of the giant spinning bottle caught light, threw different colors across the orreries suspended from the ceiling and encouraged her to dream.

  No.

  She could not move. Miriam’s intelligence must be wrong. If the Eighth House moved without proof, the Sisterhood would stumble, sensing the uncertainty of its leaders. She had to wait. Even if Sena had the book, she couldn’t open it.

  Giganalee frowned. Sena knew nothing of love.

  17 Iycestoke Society for the Study of Antiquities.

  18 I.: The Place of Burning.

  CHAPTER 16

  With twenty-six boroughs and thirty-six square miles of sprawl, Isca City was easily the largest city north of Yorba. Its population exceeded two million and Caliph had more to keep track of.

  Keeps and towns with ancient names like Clefthollow and Coldwell slugged against nature, scuffling through mist and cold and marshy fields. They had their own industries and rulers and local villains. Caliph wondered how he could be expected to compass his own section of the Duchy, let alone the other four.

  With Saergaeth’s threat, Caliph’s time for planning was attenuating. He had to know what to do.

  Now.

  Word had come from Prince Mortiman in Tentinil that the town of Bellgrass had signed a treaty with Miskatoll. Saergaeth’s wine-colored flag was creeping south. Great fuming engines scarred the south-sloping plains between the Fluim and White Leech rivers, pressing the prince’s borders like a giant thumb at the edge of a blister.

  Saergaeth needed Bellgrass because it gave his engines access to the swath of land between the rivers. They rolled south and west out of Miskatoll, heavy metal tracks tearing up the soil, plumes of black smoke and pounding echoes shivering in their wakes.

  Willoch Keep had also surrendered without a fight. Without actually attacking, Saergaeth was making headway.

  The White Leech was his new border. It fortified Saergaeth’s position as much as it hamstrung his further progress. There were few fords capable of accommodating war engines and the prince of Tentinil had taken measures to ensure that nothing crossed the river. He had mined both banks with vitriol explosives and positioned troops to overlook the fords.

  For the meantime, Saergaeth’s advance ground to a halt, hobbled by defiles his engines could not manage. But Caliph knew it wouldn’t last. The metholinate shipments out of the Memnaw had stopped.

  He knew with enervating certainty that Saergaeth’s zeppelins, which ordinarily transported canisters of gas, were being busily outfitted for war.

  Caliph had stockpiled what met
holinate Isca had, rationing use with an iron hand. But stingy allocation of resources would not win the fight . . . and it was making the populace uneasy. There were already demonstrations in Gas End. People didn’t want to fight their own countrymen, let alone a national hero like Saergaeth Brindlestrm.

  People wanted light, hot water and gas to cook with. They didn’t want to fight the man who controlled the supply. Saergaeth and Miskatoll, by virtue of the metholinate industry located on the edge of the Memnaw, controlled the largest fleet of zeppelins and war engines in the north. In order to export the gas, airships were needed. In order to protect Stonehold’s primary resource, thousands of troops were under Saergaeth’s direct command. Miskatoll had an endless supply of gas and men, both of which had now been turned against the High King.

  It hadn’t been anticipated because the Council hadn’t actually believed Saergaeth would turn traitor. And even if they had, what were they supposed to have done? Confiscate the zeppelins that the metholinate industry—that Stonehold itself—required to survive? Pull thousands of troops out of Miskatoll and leave the mining facilities denuded of protection?

  No. There hadn’t been a way to prevent this mess. Saergaeth had known his position; he had certainly used it to his advantage.

  Caliph had sent one of his three dreadnoughts to guard Tentinil by sea. The enormous ironclad ship with its pounding engines had smoldered out of Isca Bay the night before last, taking with it two thousand sailors including the two brigs that escorted her.

  Most of Caliph’s light engines were already in Tentinil. But if he sent more, Saergaeth could have a fleet of airships prowling the skies over Isca, and Caliph with little left to shoot them down.

  Caliph felt pinned, unable to maneuver. He had to keep his engines close to the city, which meant he had to face the brunt of Miskatoll’s mechanized onslaught with infantry.

  Flying his own fleet of zeppelins out to meet Saergaeth wasn’t an option. Isca’s military boasted forty airships including the Byun-Ghala and several older, less reliable models that were practically tethered to Malgôr Hangar.