The Last Page ch-1

by Anthony Huso

  “Thirsty—”

  “Me too. The water is a hundred yards back with my horse.”

  She rolled off and lay on her back like him, staring up at the tangle of limbs. For a minute they both gulped oxygen.

  “I don’t know where the others are.” She swallowed. “I think Sheridan fell. I saw you go down the slope and followed you. Your horse is dead.”

  Caliph winced and tried to sit up.

  “Don’t—” She forced herself to all fours, pulling a leaf from her hair. “You stepped on a branch and ran part of it into your foot. Hold still.”

  Her fist took hold of a fat twig protruding from the tender skin between his toes and yanked it out with a swift straight jerk. “It’s a mess down here,” she said.

  Caliph bit back on the pain that exploded in his foot.

  “Thanks.” He sounded ridiculously apologetic.

  She examined the wound for fragments.

  Caliph swore under his breath. It felt like she was digging with a shovel.

  “What did you say happened to Sheridan?” he asked, trying to stay still.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he got eaten and that’s why we’re still alive.” She scrunched her nose in distaste and put her mouth to the wound. She sucked hard and spit.

  “I’ll go to the horse. I think brandy and linen is all we have to work with.” Crouched at his feet in the twilight like a beautiful ghoul, lips red with his pain, she made efforts to reassure him. “I’ll hurry.”

  She stood and started walking, quick as her tired legs would move. She wished she could see what might be lurking in the woods. Her eyes ached from studying the Csrym T.

  She blinked several times, rubbed her eyes with her palms. A brilliant migraine was exploding at the back of her head. She could see Inti’Drou glyphs when she closed her lids, like someone had stapled the pages to their undersides. Then it dawned on her that there might be a way . . . a way to see them more clearly and still ease the pain.

  I’ll carve my eyes.

  She marched through the dying wood, thinking of the procedure, still aware of the leaves falling around her, aware that they glowed with velvety redness in the sinking sun, scarlet bodies twinkling like dozens of eyes between the trees. They were there, beyond the geometry of the wood, haunting her steps. The Yillo’tharnah. They squatted. They followed from angles that could not be protracted with instruments made by men.

  She could feel them watch her as she topped the low hill and found her horse. They stared while she inspected the creature’s right front leg. It was bleeding and didn’t look good.

  Patiently she led the animal back to Caliph. She bandaged and cleaned his wound, continually glancing behind her at the invisibles she felt breathing across her neck.

  She rinsed her mouth with brandy and gave Caliph some to drink. “It’s probably not a good idea to walk on it, especially since we don’t have a boot.” She took back the flask and had another hit.

  “Are you going to carry me?” he joked. Sena didn’t laugh as he struggled to his feet.

  “You can ride my horse,” she said distractedly. “I think it’s starting to founder.” It was a baseless guess. She knew virtually nothing about horses.

  Sena sniffed. The cold was making her nose run.

  “Caliph? Are we going to go . . . or are you going to stand there and stare at me all night?”

  But Caliph didn’t answer. An alarmed expression, blazoned in red light, was crawling over his face. He was talking. But not to her.

  “It was just like this,” he whispered. “A cemetery in the woods . . . and I was standing . . . over there.”

  He looked around.

  “It was right here.” He limped in a circle. “I think.”

  “What was?” Sena asked. She had never seen him like this.

  He didn’t answer. He hobbled farther into the yard, tracking toward the pile of dirt the sexton had left behind. Sena’s heart quickened.

  “Caliph, it’s getting dark. I’m worried.”

  But his black eyes were fixed on the marker that leaned above the half-exhumed grave. The sky grew darker by the moment. When Caliph reached it, he sat down heavily on the mound. Sena looked down with him.

  Several feet below, the ripped-apart boards of an ill-made coffin made it look like the corpse had forced its own way out. They lay splintered, thrown carelessly aside. The gray shriveled form mocked her with empty eyes partly covered by leaves.

  Caliph was sick. Neither of them had eaten much when the party stopped for lunch and his stomach turned up thin, clear bile in substitution of a good vomit.

  Sena suddenly understood his reaction. Her eyes grew wide, a pall coming over her face.

  The night she opened the Csrym Ta she had not paid any attention, but the sexton had excavated precisely according to her words, one that’s not so old . . .

  NATHANIEL HOWL, DIED 545 Y.O.T. WREN.

  THE HOLOMORPH ON THE HILL.

  MAY THE BENEVOLENCE OF ADUMMIM KEEP HIM IN CLAY FOREVER.

  He lay exposed to the air like one of his own freakish experiments.

  “He’s come back,” Caliph gurgled. A viscous line strung between his lower lip and the mound where he crouched, looking away.

  “Caliph.” She bent down beside him. “It’s only grave robbers. He’s not alive.” Weird glyphs from the Csrym T, however, made her doubt her own words. She had read the necromancer’s notes, seen the secrets in the margins, found the truth behind Cameron’s stories.

  “I dreamt it. Can’t you smell it?”

  “Smell what?”

  “Piss!” For the first time since she had known him, Caliph’s face looked truly pale. His skin was clammy against her fingers. He babbled without sense.

  “I did it. I shouldn’t have, he was just . . . gods! Why can’t he just be dead?”

  “He’s dead. He’s dead.” She rocked him in her arms, suddenly frightened. “He’s dead.”

  The words ran together in a macabre lullaby. Darkness settled in around them. Only faint light ebbed through the black thatch of trees.

  “We have to go, Caliph.”

  She felt an approaching presence. In her mind’s eye she imagined something stop to sniff the dead horse on the other side of the hill. It tilted its small head to listen.

  Caliph wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Cold light had filled his eyes.

  “Caliph! Where are you going?”

  He had begun crawling quickly, angrily through the leaves, heading for where he had dropped his sword. She tried to stop him but he threw her off. The blade gleamed.

  Sena leaned against a marker and watched in rapt fascination, enspelled by his bizarre behavior.

  A weird windy cough came from the direction of the dead horse. Something was actually there. It lurched slowly uphill from the body of the animal and supported its weight on one deformed hand. It rested, moved uphill then rested again, something that should not have had corporeal form.

  When it stopped, it listened against the wind. Sena could almost hear it pause, eavesdropping above the soft clatter of leaves.

  Her fingers gripped the headstone and pulled herself up. Naobi’s eroding face fell apart behind the trees. It didn’t seem possible that night could come so fast.

  Caliph was slogging back, oblivious, ignoring his foot, walking toward the grave with sword in hand. He looked monstrous. His black hazy shape hunched over the hole and lunged downward stroke after stroke, stabbing at the corpse. He made horrible noises like a crying animal.

  Powerful electric currents flashed in the pit, made the corpse lurch and jolt.

  Somewhere, near the crest of the hill, whatever was listening must have both seen and heard. Sena’s horse bolted. It gave a startled high-pitched snarl and left.

  No sooner had the animal vanished than a terrible sound echoed off the mountains. It ricocheted through the trees and sank into Sena’s blood like teeth.

  Caliph’s body seized in midthrust. He stopped his insane demonstration over
the grave and looked around.

  Sena stumbled.

  She stared blindly toward the origin of the inhuman echo but it was too dark to see.

  “Caliph.” Her throat had constricted and his name came out as an exsiccated whisper.

  Strangely, the scream seemed to drain Caliph’s fever. He stopped, clicked into motion, cogs running smoothly, measuring, guessing. His voice was quiet and rational again. “Sena, run for the house.”

  She continued to stumble for a long moment then she turned and almost bumped into him.

  What is the use in running? she thought.

  “Run for the house,” he said again.

  And then she obeyed. She could hear Caliph close behind her. His feet made shuffling noises in the leaves, painful limping sounds. She wondered if he would fall.

  Sena broke from the trees into the overgrown lawn before the house. She could feel the creature coming now. It ran clumsily but with unreal speed. Long spindly limbs flung it with horrific strength over the ground. It tore silently through the graveyard, bearing down through the trees, hardly disturbing the forest through which it sped.

  It could see her. It could see them. Its teeth were bared. By daylight it might flee from men and dogs, but when the sun set, it grew bold.

  Caliph ran headlong after Sena, his pain swallowed up in the urgency of flight.

  He could see her body moving like it had been made only to run. She leapt the front steps in a single bound and vanished into the house.

  He almost did the same but the gears clicked out a different course and pushed him into the overgrown bushes instead. Though still afraid, it was a cool fear.

  Quickly, efficiently he felt the ground, searching for the thing he knew was there. There was a clink and he pulled a cracked little bowl from the weeds. It was the little bowl he had nearly crushed when Sena and he had ridden up earlier that fall. The same terrible little bowl his uncle had used.

  Caliph drew his depleted sword across his palm, letting the metal bite into his flesh. He clenched his fist over the little bowl just like his uncle had shown him so many years ago.

  Now Caliph’s life ran into it instead.

  “Holomorphy needs blood,” Nathaniel used to say. “Holomorphy is blood. Blood is numbers.” A thin old man seemed to stand on the mansion steps with Caliph, a ghost mumbling in his ear. It reminded him. Prompted him at every step.

  “If I am gone and you need to be safe in the house, this is what you must do.”

  The bony fingers of the necromancer rested on Caliph’s head, stroking the boy’s hair.

  “You must not be afraid.”

  Caliph could almost see the silver knife Nathaniel used to cut his hand. One cut deep enough to count as three. The words were coming to him with the same speed as the creature.

  “Caliph, come inside!”

  Sena’s terrified voice hardly registered behind him. Distantly he heard her moving the broken door. His blood ran into the bowl. He spoke the math.

  Whether or not he wanted to be a holomorph, the syllables of the Unknown Tongue had been his nursery rhymes. He slopped his life on the front step and drew in it: the curious three-stroke mark with the toe of his boot.

  Then he set the bowl down, a blank expression on his face.

  Across the meadow something parted the trees and swung its huge gaunt frame into the grass. Caliph stepped backward into the house; he helped Sena shut the door.

  Inside, they could do little but hold the panel in place and wait. Listening. Their labored breathing and the wind pushing through the chinks made it impossible to hear.

  Pressed together, they leaned against the thick wood portal and doubted the clawing noises on the walls were only bushes.

  The door, hanging from its one hinge, could not even keep the wind out. It took all four hands to keep it in place.

  In the blackness, they stared at each other.

  A guttural, bestial snort puffed softly through the crack. Whatever it was, it was only inches away.

  It scraped on the steps—talons or claws. Slobbery heavy breathing drew the air backward.

  A hissing like the release of steam from a kettle made Sena’s breath catch audibly in her throat. Then there was a whimper and the sound of claws dragging off the steps.

  “Upstairs,” Caliph gasped.

  Sena nodded. She knew exactly where he meant. Caliph shoved several bricks against the bottom of the door then raced up the tower steps and pushed their way through the trapdoor into the onetime bedchamber of Nathaniel Howl.

  The walls of the tower still held their strange geometry. They had been carved with sigils and glyphs that plaited and interlaced, surging generally upward like rushing voices frozen in stone.

  A bedroll lay along the far wall. Aside from it, and the carvings in the ceiling, the room looked empty and remarkably clean.

  “So this is where you stayed?” Caliph surmised, limping to one of the windows and trying to peer down at the dark yard. “After you disappeared?”

  Sena sniffed and blew her nose in a handkerchief for an answer. She had a hundred lies in her head, but none of them would have worked. Anyway, she was too out of breath to lie. Instead she latched the trapdoor and walked over to the bedroll where she sat down and drew her knees up to her chin.

  Caliph was fiddling with the window.

  “I have to give you credit,” he said. “I don’t think I could have stood sleeping up here even one night.” He got the window open and the room became colder.

  “What are you doing?”

  For a reply he swung his leg over the sill. The tower had been built of stone and square holes set at intervals down the outside wall formed an invisible ladder that descended to the roof.

  Caliph’s bandaged foot tapped gently until he found one of them. As impractical as it seemed, Nathaniel’s bedroom escape route finally found a purpose.

  “Don’t worry,” Caliph said. “Whatever is down there won’t be making it inside.”

  Sena stood up, her curiosity forcing her to follow.

  “What did you do? I’ve never heard a formula like that.”

  “Something my beneficent uncle taught me.”

  Sena swung her legs out the window and sat on the sill looking down at him.

  “How old were you?” she asked.

  “Probably seven.”

  His hands and feet worked the stones in a backward rhythm until he reached the roof. He waited until Sena found her footings. Once she had gotten halfway down he set off between the gables, sidestepping toward the edge of the roof to have a look at what might be prowling in the yard. He could see the lights of Isca from here.

  Sena reached the roof and went to stand beside him.

  “You seem to be getting around all right.”

  Caliph smiled faintly.

  She decided not to follow him.

  “The shingles look rotten. Be careful.” Then her face went white.

  Both of them stopped.

  The creature was right below the eave. Its bestial breathing snorted from the bushes. Caliph got down on his knees and put his head out over the edge. The sight made him draw back quickly.

  “It’s enormously tall,” he said. “Small head. Could almost reach the second-story windows.”

  It had been gibbering quietly to itself. But it must have seen Caliph because suddenly a scream burst loose from its great rib cage and shivered the air.

  The sound, so close beneath their feet, made Sena convulse. She scooted backward toward the peak.

  “It might actually be able to do it with those arms,” Caliph whispered. He scrambled after her, heading back to the tower.

  Agitated by its unreachable prey, it now sounded like the thing was running in circles around the house, cackling and crashing through the brambles, dragging its long talons over the walls.

  When they had hauled themselves back inside, Sena went directly to the bedroll and sat down. Caliph shut the window and came over beside her.

  “I
t’s amazing that something like that actually lives out in the mountains.”

  The creature brought back blobby memories of his uncle muttering incoherently. The old man would stand at the window in his scholar robe, white haired, mumbling into his fingertips as he scanned the mountain woods for shapes that moved between the limbs. Caliph had already begun formulating plans to hunt it down and kill it.

  “It’s unreal.”

  “It’s very real,” Sena whispered. “It’s one of them.”

  Though she said more than she wanted to, her currently jumbled sense of reality made it mercifully incoherent.

  All she could remember was that same scream echoing in the mausoleum as she had unlocked the Csrym T. All her fearless rationality seemed to fall away in chunks. Her whole person felt like it was disintegrating along with her mind. Oblivion buckled the doors of reality, seeping out into a once logical world.

  “What do you mean?” Caliph asked.

  “I opened your uncle’s book,” she said quietly. “I lied and they know it.”

  “They? Who’s they?” It was Caliph’s turn to watch Sena come apart the way she had watched him in the graveyard.

  “The Yllo’tharnah,” she barely whispered.

  “The what?”

  She felt certain the creature had come for her, drawn by the book.

  Outside, the monster let loose a horrid chilling shriek followed by a cackle that freshened her reserves of fear.

  “See,” Sena licked her lips and continued to whisper, “that’s why I needed you . . . to open the book. Only I didn’t love you in time.”

  Her smile looked crazy. It crossed the borders of sanity. Took on a reckless look—one that didn’t care anymore, one that laughed at virtually everything.

  Her expression frightened Caliph more than the creature clawing at the walls.

  She stood up suddenly, smiling, her intentions all too clear. She headed for the stairs.

  “Sena, sit down.” He grappled her to the floor.

  “Yeah. Fuck me,” she whispered. Her hands fumbled with his belt. “It’s what I do best.”

  Her breath smelled like brandy but Caliph knew she wasn’t drunk. Her mouth went wild.

  Caliph pinned her to the floor for her own protection. He refused to move. She changed personality again, screamed at him, kicked and fought, but he locked himself over her like a cage. She imagined him one of the crumbling stone guardians in Sandren.