The Last Page ch-1

by Anthony Huso

  Talk with the stonemasons’ guild led her to this man, Gavin, who had interred many of Sandren’s newer additions to the stockpile of wealthy dead.

  “Few know the Halls like Gavin,” the guild master had said, “because few spend as much time in them as he does.”

  The dead languages Sena had learned at school whipped up in her head. Each one poised, ready to dissect the rich field of carvings Gavin’s light pored over.

  The carvings rose up the wall and down the passage out of sight. Sena recognized them as a form of Jingsade Runic Script, mingled with phoneticized spellings of what strangely seemed to be Mllic glyphs.

  It was an exceptional mix.

  Jingsade Runes were indigenous to locales surrounding the Great Cloud Rift; there was nothing strange about finding them here. But Mllic glyphs were found only on the isles and in desolate seaside ruins along the southern coasts—never this far inland.

  She would need rubbings to take back to her cottage for further study. So engrossed had she become, she barely heard the light grate of metal behind her.

  Suddenly, Gavin hurled himself like a block snapped loose from a scaffold crane. As she turned, Sena felt what must have been a long heavy knife strike her shoulder at an angle and glance off the studs of the watchman’s jacket.

  She fumbled for her sword, Robert’s sword, and tried to parry, but Gavin was too close. Head down, pressing her against the wall. His knife slashed gainlessly against her rib cage, unable to penetrate the jacket’s heavy leather.

  Instinctively she brought her knee up, heard his jaw snap shut with a loose-toothed crunch. A muffled yelp echoed off the carvings and a second plunge of the knife struck the wall just left of her torso.

  Gavin smelled of grease and dust. He was small but compact. His weight made her stagger. She felt herself being dragged down and couldn’t tell where his knife was. Her fear had given way to anger. Not this. Not again. She brought her knee up once more, this time striking nothing but air.

  But Gavin stumbled backward holding his face. Apparently her first blow had done more damage than she thought.

  In the tilted light she could see him swagger like the flame. For a moment it looked like he might give up, then suddenly he lunged again, apparently unaware of Robert’s sword.

  Almost with the motion of a dance step Sena caught him on the steel. His knees buckled. The thick hard fingers that had worked years of stone did grasping motions. With hardly a sound, he fell to the floor.

  Sena kicked the knife from his hand. He still breathed in a gurgling fashion.

  “Who sent you?” Her voice sounded too loud in the darkness.

  No answer.

  “Who sent you!” she screamed. But it was no use. The stonemason’s life was pooling on the floor.

  In a sudden fit she thrust her sword into him once, twice, three times. A spasm shook the body and it lay still.

  Sena sank down against the wall by the candle box. She bit back fiercely on her tears. Even trained as a Shrdnae operative with the attendant skills of the Seventh House at her disposal, she could scarcely contain the angst over this. Her first time.

  “You’re a stonemason, not an assassin,” she screamed at the corpse. The word assassin echoed hollowly down the vault. The blood on her sword was thick like syrup and seemed to shrink away from the metal, refusing to coat it with an even film.

  Who could it have been? Who could have known she had hired Gavin besides the guild master?

  The world felt small. Dangerous. The Halls smelled of Gavin’s intestines tangled with a cloying sweetness she couldn’t name. There was blood on her clothes, on the back of her hand. How had that gotten there? She tried to wipe it off. Instead, it blended into her skin like rouge. Her left hand was definitely ruddier than the other. She felt sick. The smell was making her gag.

  I can do this. It wasn’t my fault. He tried to kill me. But she knew Sandren wasn’t safe anymore. They would find Gavin’s body. Maybe. Maybe not. Gavin said no one else had been here, this deep in the Halls. Even so, he would go missing. The stonemasons would remember that she had hired him. A dog would find him, gnaw off a limb and drag it out. What now?

  Going back to the Black Couch was out of the question. Robert had no motive for killing Gavin and besides, the concierge had seen her leave, wearing Robert’s clothes. The weapon couldn’t be left behind. Nothing could be left behind. City detectives would lug iatrophysical gadgetry in to sniff the air. They would analyze molecules. They would dust for prints.

  She was beginning to remember her training, to understand how wrong everything had gone. She had made a mess by not planning ahead, not preparing for the contingency that Gavin might have to die. And that was the cardinal rule. Broken.

  Rule one: Someone other than you must be available to take the blame.

  But there was no one now. No other possible suspect. Sena held her head in her hands.

  She muttered in the Unknown Tongue, trying to jumble her molecules in the air. She tried to use Gavin’s blood, use the trick of hemofurtum she had learned in Skellum, to muddle her trail. But the air would not obey.

  How had this happened? Was Gavin after the book? She had signed a false name when she bought it.

  She spoke again in the Unknown Tongue, this time calling for light. Nothing. A third time but with the same word, she ordered Gavin’s splattered cells to illuminate the air. Quiet thrumming answered but still no sparkle. No sudden incandescence. Gavin’s candle box fluttered pathetically near the floor.

  Maybe I’m getting it wrong. But hemofurtum wasn’t a complicated skill.

  She retrieved her pouch of coins as the blackness beyond the lantern seemed to churn. Something slippery against light sidled just beyond the lens’s throw, wrapping around the massive corridor.

  Sena let the Unknown Tongue explode from her lungs but the sound echoed away, consumed by the mountain.

  She turned back to the wall, closed her eyes, resting her forehead against petroglyphic stone. It felt cool.

  Clea’s daughter, Jemi, still took a bottle at night. Sena had washed them out in the sink, cylindrical masses of clotted white, heavy and light at the same time, sliding smoothly past her fingers, vanishing suddenly down the drain.

  Here, beneath the mountain, the air was like that. Clotted-milk air. Except it was sweet. Like at the Porch of S4th. She could feel it in the Halls. Poised on the other side of rational geometry. The skin of the only dimension Sena could comprehend bulged around its cyst, its cradle. It moved. A pustule that could roam, sliding like a parasite just beneath the cuticle of real. A monster. Pressing. Struggling to reach her. Pushing its formless mass against the locus of an ancient embryonic sac.

  Sena had read about them in the small hours at Desdae. The eggs laid between the branes. The cosmic larvae stretching the membrane of physical space, stretching with alien desperation, disrupting temperatures; drafts; the basic outcomes of subtle natural events: like the striking of a match.

  Sena’s holomorphy wouldn’t work.

  Whether intentional or an inadvertence of the thing’s impossible presence, Sena’s equations remained unsolved. The math of the surrounding air had been modified just enough that her formula refused to function.

  There were myths of daemons carved into the cathedrals of the north, skeletal men with bat wings and scorpion tails. There were old woodcuts in Holthic Scripture of bipeds with wolf heads and hooves and goat tails and huge selachian teeth. But for Sena, who had pored over superlative manuscripts, piecing together the vague and hideous outlines of these starry nightmares, such woodcuts were amphigoric in the extreme.

  Real daemons had no concept of anthropomorphism; would not stoop to assume human shape any more than a biologist would attempt to become a laboratory grub in a dish of rotting meat. Real daemons, thought Sena, ignore our narcissistic renditions of evil. Real daemons cannot be fathomed.

  Sena shook convulsively. Maybe the daemons in the darkness could feel the Inti’Drou glyphs. Like ocea
nic things drawn to Naobi’s lunar glow, certain entities might be compelled toward the book in her pack.

  Sena clenched her eyes but she could still feel the horrors behind her. One or several of the Thae’gn, scrabbling silently in the ether.

  Their names were laced with nonphysical numbers and could only be written accurately in the Unknown Tongue. Sena rummaged in her pack, trying not to think of those old words.

  .

  12

  .

  13

  And most dreadful of all: .14

  They were words that twisted in the brain, their pronunciations difficult and the depth of the throaty sounds was lost when translated into Trade.

  Slowly, Sena composed herself and pulled a book of blank paper and a box of charcoal from her pack. Like a child in the lantern’s halo, she swallowed her fear and began the long task of rubbing over the inscriptions that stretched out into the infinite and eternal blackness below the Ghalla Peaks.

  Sena closed out her Sandrenese bank account and converted her money back into gems. City-state police had already been to her cottage once in the past three months. Still, she had to go home. One last time. She left her spare key with Clea and did not say good-bye to Tynan.

  When she arrived, she found her cottage more or less how’d she left it with the exception of her missing horse.

  “Did you chase away the brigands?” she whispered to Ns. Maybe the police had confiscated her horse.

  The cat looked at her quizzically with a high-pitched chirp, not even half a meow. It seemed like a vocalized question mark that asked many things at once.

  Sena noticed food items out of place. The note on the corkboard was missing. She opened her cellar. The Fall of Bendain had been taken and her atlas was left open, a page torn out. Her scowl melted into a charmed smile.

  Caliph had been here. The papers were right.

  No matter that luck had not allowed them to meet. She would be in Stonehold soon enough. A broad smile spread across her face.

  She laid the rubbings she had made in the Halls on her table and began picking them apart.

  A portion of them originated from chapters found in the Gllin Scrolls. Sena’s mother had brought copies of them from Greenwick to the mainland. The copies now belonged to the Sisterhood, but Sena’s memory was good. She licked her thumb, pulled out a book on Mllic glyphs and thumped it open.

  Referencing it often for the difficult phoneticized Jingsade spellings proved nightmarish since the glyphs were organized by shape and grouped by meaning and the phonetic representations in Jingsade gave her little clue what the glyphs themselves might look like.

  Intuition and the fragmentary knowledge gleaned from Desdae were her only guides. Still, she formulated a workable translation and copied most of it into a thin journal she could take with her.

  What is read will unseal

  Twice in bird years.

  The times are written

  On the Island Scroll that

  The skies will open.

  Where D’lig strikes

  Quietus comes.

  And there will be Three

  . . .

  To Inscribe the Final Page

  With the numbers of Nen.

  Sena had hoped for more details. She didn’t find this vague bit of verse compelling in the least. What she wanted was something coherent, real hints at what waited between the covers of the book.

  “What is read? What is red?” She liked the wordplay. She imagined this reference pointing to the Csrym T. But the homonym didn’t really work in Jingsade.

  “Final Page” rang a bell. She had heard that phrase somewhere before. Or maybe she had translated some of it incorrectly. She would have another go at it later. For the moment she was drained.

  She shut her journal despondently, gathered up the papers and folded the rubbings in half.

  The rubbings went into her pack with the journal. The other notes she took upstairs to the hearth to be burned. As she tossed each page into the flames she noticed how thin Ns looked.

  He had been safe here, as she knew he would, but not anymore. He moved cautiously around the kitchen, sniffing the floor with a pecking motion.

  Out of habit, she swept the kitchen, ignoring the stains by the door. Then she picked Ns up and left through the broken front door, walking down to the Stones.

  From the Porch of Sth she walked lines to a cromlech in southern Miryhr where she stayed at a village under a false name. She put as much distance between herself and the Stones as she could but it didn’t matter.

  That night she still dreamt of the rag-thing and of giant spectral shapes coiling in the meadow below her house. She dreamt that starry winds above the Porch filled those ghostly shapes like sails; that they had followed her from the Halls, monstrosities that suffused the sky with close, sweet humidity. They drooled otherworldly secretions, congealing across the Porch and beading on her home.

  In the dream, she could feel them gazing at her without true eyes, across dimensions, slavering mouthlessly. Only the weakest of their kind had mouths. The book had drawn them. Maybe Megan was right. Maybe she had drawn their attention by binding one of them to the cottage. But she didn’t doubt, with the Csrym T in her pack, at some point the Yllo’tharnah would have found her just the same.

  11 A controversial prophetic text said by some to list every year since 337 W.C. by name. Yacob’s Roll ends at 563 “Y.o.T. Sealed Scroll,” supposedly marking the end of the world.

  12 U.T. Approximate pronunciation: Yillo’tharnah.

  13 U.T. Approximate pronunciation: Thay’gn.

  14 U.T. Approximate pronunciation: Nayn.

  CHAPTER 13

  Public surgery happened on a regular basis in Tin Crow. When the gutters of Bloodsump Lane ran thick and red it meant someone had gone under the knife.

  Body fluids and knots of clotted blood slithered through little eyebrow grates, dumping directly into shallow channels that bordered the street. Sometimes scrubby strips of flesh would snag on the bars. They dangled stubbornly and slapped about in the ichors that issued from crowded moldy buildings.

  Sometimes it was a slow steady trickle. Other times it came in waves as though someone were sloshing hidden mistakes out with a mop.

  For a silver bek, a gentleman and his lady could purchase tickets and gain admittance, not through the gory back alleys but through slightly more professional front doors where gaslights flared on the names of well-known surgeons and grime was kept to a minimum.

  Large panes of frosted glass glowed with snowy whiteness on all sides of Grouselich Hospital’s doors.

  Nearby, a voluminous glass tube, lit from within, hung beside the brass-lettered names and cast unpleasant patterns on the bricks below. Filled with some clear fluid, through which a stream of heavier red liquid fell, the tube gurgled and hummed.

  A line of men and women had gathered, the head of which showed tickets to a bald man with a white mustache and a black suit. He had just unlocked the doors. The line of people shifted. Some watched the red liquid ebb through the tube while others whispered about what speculative horrors their tickets might grant them access on this particular night.

  All of them had heard about arms being sawn off, eyes replaced with lenses poured from glass, and the gruesome, mysterious term well worth the silvery price of admission: brain surgery.

  Everyone was giddy because everyone knew that unlike the opera, where murders and intrigue happened right before their eyes, this was for real.

  Slowly, the line edged toward the doors as the mustachioed man examined each ticket with care. He took them and turned them over, peered down his nose like a jeweler examining diamonds. Finally he made a precise tear in each one and handed it back to the bearer, motioning for them to step through the portal and into the unsettling cone of antiseptic light.

  From the front doors, the nervous ticket holders were ushered by a second man down a narrow gray hallway that smelled of chemicals. Lit by clear gas jets in steel fixtu
res, the hall felt vaguely threatening. A wooden gurney with tiny cracked wheels stood along the left wall. Draped in hospital white, it looked clean relative to the walls. Its position forced the spectators to squeeze past in single file. They made excited idiotic sounds as they passed, asking each other whether a dead body might at some time have rested on that very spot.

  A wider hallway of two-toned olive and beige welcomed them on the other side and more transparent gas jets revealed a pair of double doors that admitted the throng to an austere oval chamber with steep stands that allowed them to hover over whatever happened below.

  There was no place to sit. Voyeurs had to remain in rank, each one four feet above the other, separated by low metal railings whose topside had been upholstered with padding meant to cushion the forearms. Unfortunately the padding was like everything else, gray and thin and dilapidated. Its cracked surface had either hardened with age or altogether crumbled away.

  Below the dim tiers (which were dark enough to cause the ticket holders to stumble and ask each other why someone didn’t turn on some lights) the central oval-shaped pit basked—a sort of phosphorescent eggshell color under the glare of magnesium spotlights. As people filed in and the tiers filled up, a door in the pit opened slightly and a man could be heard talking behind it.

  “Next week . . . sure . . . just send it over there . . .”

  The pit had several tables with shiny metal tops. Dubious cloth bundles had been placed on them before the audience arrived.

  A rack of glass bulbs ranging in size from miniscule to grandiose stood at attention. Most of them contained various quantities of some clear fluid, reflecting the spotlights through a clutter of curves. Like strange retorts, their necks were screwed with metal caps fit snugly with a jungle of pink-orange hoses. The flow of fluid could be controlled from various knobs.