The Last Page

by Anthony Huso

  I’m not going crazy, she told herself.

  This is holomorphy.

  Perhaps the Eighth House had composed an argument against her. Perhaps Giganalee could send glamours from leagues away . . .

  Sena waited for the voice to come again but it did not.

  For roughly one week Sena was alone in Isca Castle. Caliph did not return and Gadriel either truly did not know where he had gone or masterfully hid his knowledge.

  Her eyes were black and purple, tinged with green. Badly bruised, she still slept with the shylock at night.

  No one seemed capable of telling her where Caliph had gone. The weather turned cold. Though the castle boilers had been fixed, she had the servants keep a fire roaring in the bedroom and a thermal crank besides.

  The servants snickered. They told her this was not cold. Cold had not even come to Stonehold yet. There was frost, yes. There was snow in the mountains. But the crops still stood in the fields, defying the shift in season. The corn stood out to dry, right down to the wire according to promises in the almanac. Every year the Duchy held its breath and hoped the austromancers were correct.

  Sena shivered under blankets and quilts. The maids, the butlers, even Gadriel seemed to have abandoned her. She started drinking to keep warm.

  She started drinking to bullwhip the coarse black ink strokes twisting through her brain. She could feel them cutting into the meat inside her skull. She started drinking to dull the pain.

  In the dark, she whispered to her bottles. Behind the black glass, lutescent liquid hung in suspended animation. Inked labels with recent dates denoted when each of the delicate sherries had been sentenced to life below the cork. She regarded the bottles as tombs. Prisons that kept out light.

  She drank for the sake of the sherry. She drank to free them. In the twinkling blackness, she drank while watching a bottle she had flung from the neck, burst against the hearth. It shattered with a triumphant explosion of tiny shards and pale juice. Each splinter of glass, each droplet, they glistened midair, turning slowly, exultant. She drank in celebration.

  She knelt down as if at a grave and patted the wet floor like she might have patted the place Ns’ ashes were buried. When she lifted her hand, a ringlet of razor-edged glass dangled from her thumb. It hung there like a piece of strange jewelry, like a parasite. She took a drink and pulled it out, watched her blood ooze from the slit. It seemed too dark, nearly black against her cold white flesh. Like ink, she thought. As I move, so moves the quill of the gods. She smeared her thumb in fantastic random patterns over the floor. “They will not hold me,” she said, laughing. “They will not lay me in some catacomb to ferment.” She dragged her gushing thumb in ever more erratic circles. “They will not use me!” she shrieked. “As a tool—”

  Two of the servants found her and dragged her from the glass-strewn room.

  They bandaged her hand. They swept, mopped and swept again. They got out a clean charmeuse robe with lace that plunged past her waist. They tied it around her and put her in bed. Then they took away her bottles and left her in the dark.

  The darkness thickened into layers of wax. Layers of murk and loneliness and irritating fear. She felt herself suffocating: an insect below a dripping candle. The servants slept. Solitary guards rasped and scraped through the empty hallway beyond her door.

  Sena pulled her knees up under the covers. The lacy robe barely covered her ass. She held herself for warmth while the castle’s silence tore into her. This, she decided, was a deeply haunted place.

  I’m not mad. I’m not mad.

  She found herself watching the tapestries, hung in silent folds, animated by the coals in the fireplace. The coals cast nimble black demons off every piece of furniture. She stared for so long that when it finally came she couldn’t tell if it was just another illusion.

  In a small terrible hour, like a plume of soot, an ancient scholar’s robe rose on the draft and dragged across the floor. Dreadfully thin and hunched it sat in the tall carven chair near the door and whispered of the immutable past.

  I’m not mad. But she did not sleep.

  In the morning, bleary and wasted, she capitulated with the specter’s demand and opened up the grimoire. Her life had became its pages.

  Several days later, she noticed the Herald. It was her only link to events beyond the castle.

  The newspaper told her King Lewis had been arrested the same day Caliph had left and that he was being detained in Isca Castle, a captive guest in one of the towers.

  A peculiar insult, the article validated her recent feelings of debarment. She thrust the article at Gadriel and demanded an explanation. The seneschal glanced at her eyes as he did every morning and quickly looked away. He demurred pathetically, presented her with a choice of northern coffees.

  His disavowal put her in a rage.

  She threw the Herald down in front of him and screamed. But the High Seneschal was a formidable adversary. In response to her tantrum, he offered her cream.

  Recognizing the iron wall for what it was, Sena ordered him from the room.

  That night, she strapped her utility belt around her waist, tugged on her soft black boots and slipped her kyru in its sheath. King Lewis would be well guarded. She closed her eyes and the colors returned, guiding her. She knew the way.

  Time became something she could gloss before it happened. She could see castle guards before they turned the corner, saw their numbers like halos in the air. Probabilities. Angles. Algorithms of the next.

  Her vision didn’t compute in three dimensions anymore. It was ghosted with time, future happenings all around her. Sometimes they blurred where probabilities split, made whole corridors hazy with risk. But if she waited, silent and safe, things changed, pathways opened, unpredictability passed away and she could move again. Pale cones of perception spread out from people’s eyes, both current and future. All she had to do was walk or stand outside their line of sight.

  She left the High King’s bedroom through a window. Since her outburst, Gadriel had placed sentries just outside the door . . . in case she felt ill again, he said, or needed assistance.

  Sena smiled at his pathetic attempt to cage her and stretched for the cornice above the window, touched it and left the bedroom empty in her wake. She moved quickly, like an arachnid, fingers sticky with holomorphy. She was blindfolded but she could see. She sensed Lewis in the towers above, behind a locked and brightly guarded door. He sat by himself, playing with a stack of ivory plaques, fortune-telling devices once trusted by the general public, now sold in Three Cats only to amuse.

  Sena saw the guards as well. Her new eyes made everything easy. She re-entered the castle through an open window twenty stories up into the night. It was a lightless side room and she paused to listen to the men outside the door.

  Her eyes were well, but she still wore the shylock. She had discovered a new use. With a single word she could pinch it, goad it with a cantrip and the thing would tighten to her face, appendages that normally hung like decorative leather straps writhed. She felt it take a deeper bite. Blood oozed below the mask, ran in perfect painted lines along her cheek.

  She spoke, robbed the creature of its meal, forced it to draw more sustenance as she burnt her own holojoules in prosecution of the air. Logic twisted. The Unknown Tongue sentenced six castle guards to coma.

  Sena opened the door and stepped over their sleeping bodies. The shylock squirmed. It took only what it needed then stopped. She bent to recover a heavy ring of keys.

  Beyond King Lewis’ door she could tell the coals were dying, dribbling purple light across the floor.

  She pulled the bolt back with a loose clank and the thick portal opened slowly, heavy timbers floating on oil.

  Lewis looked up to see her standing in the door frame.

  He scowled, obviously trying to make sense of it. She imagined the extraordinary image: a blond woman, seemingly blind, the fallen guards, the little trails of red oozing from her mask.

  Encircling h
er was an oversized belt that holstered her sickle and other tools. In her right hand was a potion, a decanter she had just pulled out. It was made of glass and filled with something red.

  She saw Lewis toy with the idea of taking her hostage but the gory potion and her mask seemed to distract him.

  “I wouldn’t,” she said. “I’m the High King’s witch.”

  “So I’ve read in the papers. Midnight snack?” He gestured to the decanter.

  “Something like that. Holomorphic provisions.”

  “Ah.” Lewis lifted his eyebrows and then gestured to the bed. “I’m afraid I’m short on furniture, but please . . . sit.”

  Sena placed herself on the edge of the mattress, one knee draped over the other, perched like something weightless. She dangled the decanter between her fingers.

  “It’s dark in here.”

  Lewis chuckled. “Try taking that . . .” he noticed the blood tears again, “. . . mask off.”

  Sena came to the point.

  “I want to know why you’re here.”

  Lewis smiled. “You’re not here officially are you?”

  “I’m not asking,” said Sena.

  Lewis glanced out at the incapacitated guards. “No. I suppose you’re not. Pretty as a seashell though. Maybe my friends contracted you through Skellum to clean me up?”

  “What friends?”

  Lewis only chuckled. He seemed prepared for this, ready for some assassin to end his journey through the courts. Sena realized that he wouldn’t talk, that she was wasting time. She liked him. She liked his false resignation, his sense of humor, the calculations she could feel him making underneath it all. And yet, she let the decanter slip from her hand. Delicate facets shattered on impact, a sloppy crunch that burst against the floor like a bloodsucking arachnid made of glass.

  Already, her survey of the Csrym T had augmented her skills. She recycled Caliph’s mind-reading formula from the library in Desdae and pared it down, added to it and pared it down again.

  King Lewis’ mind went blank and Sena rummaged in it, semimethodically, as if searching a head of lettuce for bugs. She found all kinds of things. She knew why Lewis’ chest hurt.

  It had started after a squad of Iscan military personnel had escorted him forcefully back to Isca Castle. Alani’s men had discovered his alliance with the Pandragonians.

  Lewis himself had helped smuggle the solvitriol blueprints out of the country.

  But he hadn’t confessed or denied. He had simply stood, chest hurting, wishing that he hadn’t been caught.

  Lewis knew the Pandragonians and so Sena knew them too. She saw them clearly in his head. Bjorn Amphungtal and Msgr. Pratt.

  She knew how they had stopped on their way to Isca Castle on the second of Kam, pausing at Kennan Keep to meet with Roric Feldman. They had moored. They had disgorged great piles of weapons and supplies onto Saergaeth’s new flight deck. They had signed contracts and promised to help remove Caliph from the throne in exchange for favorable trade agreements once Saergaeth took the throne.

  And that was Lewis’ secret: that Pandragor and Yorba and several other countries were watching Stonehold’s civil war with vulture eyes. That other countries had become intimately involved in Stonehold’s civil war and were counting on Caliph Howl to lose.

  The ambassadors that had flown to Isca Castle had only ever been a ruse. Deals had already been cut with the Shrdnae Sisterhood, with Saergaeth, with Peter Lark.

  David’s set of blueprints had already been sent south.

  And now Pandragor would be sending zeppelins, actual troops to bolster Saergaeth’s mighty fleet.

  For the first time, Sena understood with sudden numbing fear, the precarious position of Caliph’s reign. The impossibility of any chance that he would succeed. She swore in a whisper. Saergaeth was going to win!

  Sena withdrew from Lewis’ brain, lobotomized the memory of her, locked the door and crept spiderlike back to her bedroom. The guards would wake, confused to find the shattered vial, and that would be her only trace.

  Sena did not sleep that night. She pondered instead how she might use the Csrym T to help save her king.

  25 U.T. Approximate pronunciation: Cal’cr’Nok.

  CHAPTER 38

  When Ghoul Court is cleaned, it is like doing a thorough brush across the front of the city’s teeth, the visible gunk comes off. But the more conniving criminal element sinks further out of sight. Sena sees them with her new eyes, waiting in Isca’s deepest cavities and cracks. She dreams of them at night, moaning creatures in the sewers, far below the opera house, bellowing a nameless emotion.

  She can no longer talk about what she sees. Her eyes are healing, the corneal layers gelling into a single lens, a single filter that delivers transcendent messages to her mind. She cannot talk about what she sees because there are no words to describe. Only old words. Words that call things as they used to be, not as they are now. Once she saw a chair, a gas lamp, a wine bottle. Now she realizes that what she saw was really only what she thought.

  Adumbrations.

  She used to see sketches of meaning, instantaneous renders of objects flickering through her mind. She could categorize them quickly, use them as signposts, directional cues. But now she understands that it wouldn’t have mattered how many adjectives she attached to the wine bottle, or how closely she might have studied it with her old eyes. Even if she had measured it, weighed it, calculated its yaw pitch and roll, its potential kinetic energy, its tensile strength . . .

  A textbook full of wine bottle statistics would have still been an approximation. A pile of different disconnected thoughts.

  Now she sees. She sees the whole bottle. She sees its layers unified, interpreted and as it is. She sees it emotionally, potentially, with sunlight streaming through, casting colors and shadows. She sees it in every possible light. Every angle, temperature and locale. She sees it physically, every molecule, every particle in its composition. She sees it chronologically before it is a bottle, being made into a bottle, as a bottle now. She sees it broken, shattered, molten, every kind of death. She sees it spiritually, diagramed in ether, its eternal planning in a thought. She sees it lovely, as a sentimental gift, a talisman, embodying the memory of a celebration, an anniversary, a first drink, a last drink, a love, the method of seduction, a habit, something forgotten or ignored, a bauble, an implement of cruelty and limitless torture. She can still call it a bottle. She remembers the old word. But the word is empty and cannot pass any of the bottle’s meaning as she sees it now, nothing of the true thing.

  And it is not just the bottle that she sees this way. It is everything in the world.

  She sees all objects not as symbols but as they are, whole, unified, with nothing lost in translation between her consciousness and her eyes. She sees the thing, all things. Directly. And this, she understands suddenly, is also the power of the Csrym T.

  Inverted.

  She has realized. The problem with other books is their length and imprecision. So many sentences, ideas, chapters . . . all tied together perhaps, but fragmented . . . hidden, buried in the pages. The concepts must be explained, diagramed, with paragraphs, examples, forcing the words to do their job, to communicate clearly all the steps of cooking veal, or building a centrifuge, or getting along with one’s lover. And in the end, there are bits that stick, like a red flower in the grass, the main idea or several key ingredients. The mind sorts through the pile left behind, the chunks it can remember.

  But not in the Csrym T.

  In the Csrym T, the Inti’Drou glyphs are so much more than blueprints for systems, for worlds. They are not just symbols on a page. Inti’Drou glyphs are nothing less than the objects they describe. Not pictograms. The math of the thing is there, trapped, twisted intolian ink. The math is alive. Compressed. Like in a spring. Undo the latch, release the mechanism, and the glyph unfolds, into planets, into creatures, into stars and subdimensions. The glyphs are more than real. They are reality.

  And t
he glyphs are whole, on one page, captured in a glance. No chapters to sort through. No metaphors or diagrams or grammar used at all. The initial confusion she faced between hundreds of subjects and objects has gelled, cleared. With her new eyes she sees the raw ethereal information contained in particles of light. In ink. All of it together. Together. Precise.

  Words in Hinter, words in Trade, haunt her through the night. Torture her with their constraints. She dreams of definitions that do not fit.

  But there are some words, strange, cooling words, like moon sweat, that dapple her pia mater during sleep, running molten cold through her sulci, soaking deep into her brain. They sound smooth . . .

  Sslî. Ooil-Üauth. hloht.

  They are giving her direction. They are telling her what to do. And despite her desire to help Caliph she finds herself instead looking out across the world, perhaps because the facets of her eyes derive from cuts meant for hunting. But she has modified the angles, used the Csrym Tto adjust the purpose of her eyes. It is safe to say that no one in the Sisterhood has eyes like Sienae Iilool.

  In the autumn chill, she sits at night, facing south, staring through her bedroom wall. She looks from her vanity through Blkton, South Fell and Maruchine, through phantasmagoric drainpipes in the substructure of Ghoul Court.

  She sees the slaughter of the muck spies, the venting of blood into cavernous byways. The Lua’grc are cleaning up. The flawless are moving. The huge maggot bodies she associates with the attack on her cottage are abandoning Isca’s drains.

  Yrisl will be the only muck left, protected by the castle and his loyalty to Caliph Howl.

  The Lua’grc are not angry with him though they would kill him if they could. Yrisl does not answer the dispatches they have sent him.

  But the Lua’grc are removed from human emotion. They would kill him out of utility rather than rage.

  The city watch now recognizes the Lua’grc half-breed spies. The mucks are of no further use. So they are eaten, bones and all, rich nutrients ingested, the blubber and talons of the cannibals fortified preparatory to the journey ahead.