The Last Page

by Anthony Huso

  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 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 a
nyone 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 forgivable sin. And yet, Yrisl had nodded his approval. And now it was Alani’s turn to hear the plan.

  Initially, the old spymaster slumped slightly, legs crossed in a deceptively tranquil pose. But as Caliph began to talk, the old assassin scratched his knuckles faintly and adjusted his posture in the chair. He fumbled with his pipe, lit it nervously and laid it aside without a toke. And when at last the High King finished, Alani sat in stunned silence, digesting every syllable he had heard.

  Finally he picked up his pipe. Without an encouraging puff, the thick tobacco had snuffed itself. He fondled the bowl and muttered, “Do you really think it can be done?” The old man’s voice was sagely diplomatic. It betrayed neither skepticism nor contempt. Rather, Alani’s question indicated through its perfect timbre that if the High King answered yes, that would be good enough for him.

  Caliph looked hard at the spymaster.

  “Everything I’ve told you is true. In that respect, it can be done. But you’re the man that would have to see it through.

  “Risky isn’t even the word. It’s touch and go at best. But if we had even a sixty-five percent success rate . . . Mother of Mizraim, if we managed even fifty percent, it would give our fleet a fighting chance.

  “Logistics are what I’m counting on from you,” said Caliph. “Insight. A tether back to sanity, I guess. I’ve been thinking about it, bottling it up for so long. I don’t even know what it must sound like anymore, hearing it for the first time. So . . . it’s your turn. You tell me. What do you think?”

  Alani stuffed his unlit pipe back inside his vest and folded his hands across his lap. Caliph could tell he was choosing words carefully.

  “Well—since it is all true . . . and understanding the implications of even marginal success . . . we don’t have much of a choice. You have these . . . suits ready?”

  “After a fashion. Willing test subjects are, as you can imagine, difficult to find.”

  Alani smiled and made the southern hand sign for yes.

  “It’s already out that we have solvitriol power,” said Caliph. “The Pandragonian ambassador himself accused me of theft. It wouldn’t be that far-fetched for Saergaeth to believe . . .”

  “We need papers,” said Caliph. “All kinds of official documentation. It has to look absolutely real.”

  Alani nodded and spoke with quiet businesslike decorum.

  “I’ll take care of the details. Just two additional items I wanted to mention.

  “One is King Lewis. He may have reconsidered his position. He wants an audience.”

  Caliph hoisted one eyebrow but remained objective.

  “That would be a welcome twist. When?”

  “Lewis likes to hunt. Invite him on one . . . maybe next week?”

  Caliph continued playing with his bottom lip.

  “The cotters have been complaining about some creature in the hills. We could use Lewis’ visit as an excuse to go after it. I’ll talk to Gadriel and work something out. What else?”

  “A Pplarian ship arrived this morning in Ironside . . . bearing gifts. Some very interesting weapons and, apparently, a manual on their use.”

  “I’ll come to Ironside this evening. I need to talk with Sigmund Dulgensen.”

  “I had planned to bring them up to the castle—”

  “No. Don’t do that. I have to visit Glôssok anyway. Might as well save a bunch of soldiers having to fly them up.”

  Alani smiled.

  “As you wish.”

  At first they thought it was syphilis.

  White rubbery gummata or necrotic chancres metastasized from people’s mouths and loins. But when it intensified and spread like pox, fear set in.

  In Isca, where the sounds of coughing could easily leap between proximate windows like agile thieves, the word “plague” induced exoteric pandemonium.

  Soap sold out in pharmacopolist and apothecary shops. Misinformed valetudinarians draped white linen in all the windows and doorways of their narrow homes.

  Most already regarded the visitation’s alleged breeding ground with fear and loathing and didn’t voice objection when Ghoul Court was herded and burned.

  One hundred knights and a thousand city watch converged on the unofficial borough like creatures from outlawed reality. Proboscidean masks dangled through fat tendrils of boiling air. Limp snouts swayed as they filtered breathable oxygen out of alleys swollen with plague and voluminous white clouds of disinfectant smoke.

  Heavy, reinforced leather cuirasses covered the watchmen’s chests. Though it created a troubling domestic image, the knights wore chortium armor. They plugged in chemiostatic goads that hummed malevolently. Rubber-coated cables supplied the power from glowing cells embedded in the armor’s spines.

  The Herald published several arguably autarchic paragraphs that labeled Ghoul Court the disease’s epicenter. Caliph had composed them and given them to the press.

  All necessary force will be used to protect legitimate city boroughs not only from disease but from Ghoul Court’s long unchecked criminal element.

  The Herald (and several other newspapers still cowed by the memory of Mr. Vhortghast’s visits) published the High King’s words without commentary on the morning of the operation.

  The notion of contagion had such an effect on the populace that Caliph’s outré response surprisingly rallied opinion polls at Gunnymead Square.

  There were many annoyed citizens who had walked or ridden streetcars for years in order to avoid the Court. They would have supported even harsher measures while dissentients lined up against them like charged particles—pluses against minuses—some cosmic example of ineluctable binary: a natural array of checks and balances that maintained uneasy equilibrium.

  A scant hour before dawn, when the onslaught trampled out of Daoud’s Bend, Lampfire and Maruchine, word had leaked that troops were on their way and students from Shaerzac University had shown up across the end of Seething Lane to protest.

  They waited in the predawn; drinking, smoking and singing songs, linked together arm in arm across the street. They expected their demonstration to have an impact when the troops arrived.

  But unlike the city watch, the knights had little patience for civil disobedience. Their objectives had been given by the High King and they did not understand the concept of failure. Because the demonstration interfered with tactical surprise they plowed through the ranks of barking students as if they had been tissue.

  Startled when their lines were sundered and their antigovernment banners burst into flame, most of the activists fled. Some were struck with goads or the metal-shod bottoms of rubber shields. Many were arrested. A handful became casualties of the raid.

  A sophomoric fac
e screamed loudly that “Violence will never win!” His attempt to tackle one of the knights met with a gleaming bar of chromium steel. His crazed expression and vicious scrabbling with the knight’s gas mask ended instantly when the goad swung out, smooth and unstoppable like a girder on chains. Its electrically charged body busted several of the student’s ribs and abrogated the luxury of many presupposed civil rights.

  Placards showing Caliph Howl holding a gory sword and flaunting a malefic grin were abandoned on the street.

  The knights and watchmen burst through veils of whipped-cream air. Their gloves aimed billowing hoses that vomited massive canopies of smoke. Waves of men and women held rubber shields and chrome batons and wands that outpoured flame. Heavy cleated boots crashed through barricaded doors and windows. A variety of lives were crushed and mangled in their wake.

  It was not a gentle raid.

  The police roared into Ghoul Court with halgrin on thick chains.

  Vast porcine beasts, seven feet at the shoulder, the halgrins’ skeletons supported nearly a ton of mottled flesh and bone. Black and pink and hairless except for wiry strands that bristled on their humps, the halgrin mauled and shredded anything that scrambled or fell within their jaws.

  Like a warthog, stipular tuberosities depended in grotesque array from jowly skulls. Their cloven hooves flinderized crates and wooden carts, pulverized bottles discarded by winos into glassy dust and thundered on the paving stones.

  There were less than ten of the daemon swine, taken out of Tibin and trained from sucklings. Beyond what they could physically savage, they impacted the battle mostly through morale.

  Hackles raised, the monsters’ tusks splayed from mouths like overeager claws. Ropy turbid saliva draped like molasses toward the ground.

  The beating Ghoul Court’s occupants received was utterly severe and in many people’s minds, condign.

  Knights trod like heavy metal bulls through dreary tenements and filthy dens, overturning tables and beds strewn with the clutter of a hundred messy sins. Locked attics, occupied by smuggled contraband or shivering catamites, shed ugly secrets under the brutal use of rams.