The Last Page ch-1

by Anthony Huso

  In the end she stopped cursing and grew still.

  “I hate you,” she whispered. “I hate your damned logical mind.”

  An hour later she slept.

  Caliph did not.

  An inhuman gibbering noise came from the window and he saw her turn fitfully in her sleep.

  Far away in Isca, Caliph heard an alarm horn sound. Its blare floated into the foothills and the creature outside grew quiet. More horns took up the note and carried it far above the blackness.

  The High King had turned up missing.

  CHAPTER 37

  Sena woke quietly.

  Her lids flicked open to see Caliph staring at her. He sat across the comfortless room with his arms resting on his knees. A band of light from the window marked his face like a welt.

  “Didn’t you sleep?” she asked.

  “It stopped making noise a few hours before dawn.”

  Sena sat up. “I’m cold. Come warm me up.”

  Caliph sighed. His eyes made a circuit of the floor. He walked over to her.

  “Feel how cold I am?”

  Caliph nodded.

  “How did you stay so warm?” She burrowed against him. A queer disavowal of the night before.

  “We should get back,” Caliph said. He pushed her gently away, repulsed by her variance.

  The whole way back to the city, Sena cracked brittle jokes while Caliph watched people flee Isca on tractors and steam cars piled with possessions. When Caliph didn’t respond she accused him of being grumpy.

  He looked through her as though she were a curl of smoke from the farmsteads along the road. He saw behind her smile where men with enormous axes were herding furry pigs to slaughter.

  A moment later a patrol of soldiers put an end to his self-absorbed metaphor and whisked the two of them back to Isca Castle.

  After their return, Sena lost track of Caliph.

  As often happened, he disappeared abruptly into the unremitting political cauldron that cooked the insides of Isca Castle.

  But today’s level of activity was extreme even by wartime standards. More odd, it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the previous night.

  Sena watched as men in suits ushered Caliph toward the epicenter of an administrative stew. For a moment they patted his back, asked briefly if all was right and then got down to the business of thrusting dossiers and charts into his vacant hands while yelping highlights above the chatter.

  Sena could tell something had happened during their time in the hills. Maybe it was something to do with Saergaeth. She would find out eventually. In the meantime she was simply too tired to care.

  Caliph hurried off, surrounded by advisors and bodyguards and a constant, migrainous din.

  Sena took the stairs, ascending the city’s quintessential cupola, climbing wedges into the sky. She headed like a moth, despite her exhaustion, for the drab garret with the occult beacon no one else could see.

  When she reached the room she stared out over the bleak mansions and hollow-eyed factories. The city was like one of the glyphs. So intricate, so vast in meaning. It seemed impossible to understand. She turned and looked at the book: red, fouled and indifferent.

  She opened it. The cover folded back unhindered, mundanely submissive to her demands.

  Her skin prickled like a weather prophet feeling electricity or something tighter than air. She gathered items: antiseptic, clean cloths, a bowl of water. Megan had given her the shylock two years ago as a contingency. In case she ever decided to carve her eyes. Sena found it at the bottom of her pack, tried it on, felt it move slightly like a leech adjusting its grip. It covered only her eyes.

  She took it off and set it aside.

  She opened a little wooden case. Inside was an instrument with chrome loops, opposable tunsia blades and an adjustable arm with a mirror the size of a coin. Sena looked into the tiny mirror where the dark scalpels hovered over her reflection.

  Yella byn! What am I doing? Her stomach turned. She put the instrument down and looked at the Csrym T.

  Black voluted glyphs spread profligate like curled legs, amphibious and strange. They wrapped thorny triple-jointed arms around her mind; clutched, jerked, teased and baited her.

  Centric figures, bolide detonations in ink, swept out across the page in comet patterns. Stellar holocausts. Cosmic orgies. Transient metempsychosis: like sheet lightning, stuttering through ten thousand bodies in an instant, through clouds and rich celestial humors.

  Sena’s eyes raced, struggled to stay ahead of the darkness that devoured the tail of every symbol she understood. The inked pictures played tricks.

  Dead things walked.

  Suns burnt out amid cataclysmic trauma. Cold alien oceans sparkled and slithered with a million breeding things. Harsh light stabbed out of primeval mist, out of cells that were neither plant nor animal nor anything in between.

  The Csrym T might have been the sacral vade mecum for creatures capable of profound modulation. But there was too much of it. Too much in it.

  Sena’s pulpy head couldn’t help abbreviating the abstruse concepts, shortening perfect structures into imperfection, substituting across the prevaricated line that separated beauty from horror.

  Her brain, her body, in the context of the Csrym T, was a fibrous cyst: temporal, momentary, riddled with lethal flaws. Already, on reflex, she had pulled a comforting shroud over the blinding concepts, coddling herself from a toxic rarefaction of truth.

  She pushed the book away.

  I can’t avoid it. In moments I’ve lost centuries.

  Words in Dark Tongue made sounds inside her skull. They searched for sustenance and found nothing.

  I will fix my eyes, she thought. I will master this thing.

  She picked the scalpel back up, made sure her bowl and rags were ready. Carefully, carefully, she began to cut into her eye.

  She felt the blades touch her cornea, slide into it at an angle. The clear coat flopped up, granting access to the lens. Her movements were subtle, careful. She whispered as she went, using tiny bleeding capillaries to work the Unknown Tongue. She crafted facets with the double knife, cut inscriptions that would have made a miniaturist gape. There were numbers. There were shapes. Angles and circles and tiny triangles engraved on multiple layers of cornea. She cut her eye into thin sheets of film, put diagrams on various strata, sandwiched them together, compressed them.

  She dabbed at her tears. An endless gush of fluid poured across her face. Finally she was done.

  Now . . . the other eye.

  After several more hours, throbbing in pain, she slipped the mask over her head. It was dark but the Inti’Drou glyphs still floundered in her brain. She concentrated on something simple, something capable of restoring her identity. She thought of Caliph and the way Prince Mortiman had looked at him.

  Sena woke up blind. She could feel the mask working on the swelling. Like a smell-feast, the shylock was actually a more docile cousin of the scarlet horror. It was brown, silent and sleepy. It could be cut and sewn like a sheet of leather in order to fashion gloves or boots. This one had been hibernating in her pack for two years. She felt its gentle suction on her swollen eyes.

  She fumbled for the bed. Caliph’s side was still made, pillow undisturbed beneath the quilt. “Caliph?”

  She was seeing things, bits of light that could not be light. The shylock kept her in darkness. Am I hallucinating?

  She got up. She could tell where the fireplace was. She could see it, snagged against the wall like a tuft of cotton in a thicket. It moved. It was ephemeral. Its shadows seemed to breathe. The room swayed as if underwater. Sena stumbled and fell. She felt blood trickle down her cheek.

  “Godsfire!” Her head hurt. Her bladder was going to explode. “Caliph?” Bluish impressions tracked across her cerebellum from the right. She turned as if toward a light, smacked her forehead on the bed. “Yella byn! Fuck!” She reached out, touched the wooden pillar, groped past it, trying to make sense of what she interpreted as
sight. She tried to shut her eyes then cursed at her stupidity. She couldn’t close her mind against the impressions even with the shylock clinging to her face. “Mother of Mizraim I have to pee!”

  The shylock left its presence in her blood and forced her kidneys to work overtime. She wondered how long she had been asleep. I can’t make it! She thought of the agonizing walk to the toilet.

  Pastel colors rinsed her brain. She could see the bank of windows in Caliph’s bedroom. She reached out, walked toward them, uncertain they were real.

  One of the panes swung in and folded against the wall admitting a chilly mass of air, fresh with rural smells.

  She undid her belt.

  The ledge beyond the room was wide and deep and draped in cool blue. Diamonds of gold sparkled on the tower’s skin as the sunlight crept east, dragging over rough stones, catching every chink and mortar line. The colors were bizarre. Too saturated. Too bright.

  Below the castle wall, architecture snarled and stirred as part of some remote world seen through veils of dream. Her pants unsnapped on either leg and crumpled to the floor in leather folds. Thin metallic sounds and indistinct voices curled out of the Hold. Her mind bucked again at the realization that she was not seeing anything. What if I fall?

  She climbed out onto the ledge, clothed only from the waist up and the knees down. She set her boots several feet apart and leaned back on her palms. Like one of the grotesques on Hullmallow Cathedral, she perched at the brink of disaster.

  The cool air felt delicious; it mouthed her vulva and sent a tingle through her. She relaxed and allowed herself to foul the sky. Her boots grated. She moved backward on her palms, withdrawing into the room. She resnapped her pants, found the basin, washed and sat down.

  She was dizzy. She thought about taking the shylock off but reconsidered. Although she wanted to try her new eyes on the Csrym T, she would have to wait. Other sisters had warned to keep the shylock on for several days. She laid back across the bed, dreaming that the ceiling moved with impossible colors.

  I can’t sleep.

  She got up and left the room.

  General Yrisl passed her in the hall. He looked at her, assumed she couldn’t see him and raised an eyebrow in what must have been a hint of scorn. He was in a hurry, still buttoning his shirt. Sena’s brain saw everything: his torso, muscular but slightly flabby at the same time, white with the telltale sag of middle age. She dreamt past his shirt, through the fibers, caught a glimpse of something dark and twisted at the center of his belly. A twirl of ink. A shadow, small and indistinct, nested behind a thick patch of hair.

  Only then did she recognize his faded resemblance to the tall gaunt forms of Mr. Naylor and his friends. His glassy eyes contained a redoubling significance, suddenly odious.

  “General?”

  He turned, surprised. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Nothing. I just wondered if it was you.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I have to hurry. The Byun-Ghala is leaving.”

  “Where is it going?”

  “I’m sorry.” He sounded sincere. “I’m afraid it’s classified.”

  She let him go, terrified of the sudden symbology associated with him. But was it real? Was it true? She dreamed where he was going and picked a route that would let her watch him unobserved.

  She avoided the main corridors, not wanting to be seen. Some crazy girl walking with a blindfold. She felt ridiculous.

  She skirted through rooms and hallways, picking her way toward parts of the castle that did not see regular use. Finally she came to an oriel that overlooked the zeppelin deck. From here she could sense Caliph’s luxurious airship ballooning over the huge expanse of concrete and old stone, casting pincushion shadows from its outspread spines.

  Yrisl was marching across the field of masonry toward a body of knights whose huge ornate carapaces glittered with colors like emeralds and rust.

  At the center of the knights she sensed Caliph leaning against a stack of chiseled gun-stones.

  As the Blue General approached, Caliph seemed to levitate slowly like oil smoke in the frosty air. The knights shuffled. Some conversation took place. Then the whole party headed for the docking tower.

  Sena still couldn’t make sense of it. Had she imagined the mark on Yrisl? It confused her enormously. He had been less than six feet from the Csrym T on many occasions. It had rested in the high tower in plain sight. If he was from the Cabal, why had he not seized the book?

  Her thoughts went back to the night it had disappeared from the desk in Caliph’s bedroom only to reappear in the same place.

  She sensed the party of knights had come out onto the tower roof, into thin sunlight. They were followed by Caliph and Yrisl. They boarded the Byun-Ghala while men in dark leather made adjustments to several new-looking weapons that jutted from the airship’s belly.

  Silvery gadgets with smooth, organic-looking segments, hoses and ornate gears hung from refitted turrets. Sena recognized the craftsmanship from other sources she had seen around the city as being (possibly) of Pplarian design.

  Almost as soon as the bridge lifted away, the zeppelin’s engines gave a slurred whine. Heavy fan blades poured air across the fins, dislodging the ship like an enormous bumblebee from some gruesome flower. It hovered, clumsy at first, moving in imperceptible increments, inches at a time.

  It turned. It raised. Its turrets spun. Spines bristled. Guns shone. The blue pennant of the High King uncoiled, a silken lioncel, a serpent of cloth unwinding in the zeppelin’s wake. Then the airship found itself between the castle’s piled spears of stone. It no longer moved in inches or feet but sprang, bloated with sluggish violence, a bullfrog leaping out between towers, hauling its girth west.

  Sena felt it go. A strange sensation of abandonment distilled within her. He hadn’t even said good-bye. The image of him lounging against the cannonballs seemed frozen in her mind.

  She made her way from the oriel to their bedroom, took a bath, brushed her teeth, drank a cup of coffee Gadriel had left by the door and brushed her teeth again.

  She read the Iscan Herald with the shylock on, the only copy in the castle. She sensed her lukewarm bathwater funnel down the drain. It ebbed from the tub’s enameled roses like rain. I must be seeing, she thought. What else can this be if it isn’t sight?

  But the bathtub seemed to breathe, the pages of the paper modulated in her hand. She felt the water in the pipes slipping down the drain. She followed it for a while.

  There must be something wrong with the furnace. The pipes were cold. She used the Herald to start a fire. She left the room, fetched the Csrym T, brought it back to bed. She got out her notebook and scribbled a page of notes: all with the shylock on.

  Am able to see better than I thought. Will attempt to decipher part of a glyph with the shylock still on.

  Yllo’tharnah seem to be following the book. I don’t know how, but a corporeal manifestation nearly killed us at Nathan’s mansion: a 25Why? Are there Lnshin’thn too? Are there limits to Their hierarchy?

  I assumed the One I bound at the Porch of Sth was alone.

  Am having nightmares. Shapeless things. I see insuperable slithering masses in the dark. I feel giddy all the time. Something is happening.

  This glyph. This jellyfish glyph. I have no other name for it. It terrifies me for reasons I cannot describe. Ref: page 847 of C.T.

  Cataclysm. Creation. Things I can’t explain. Can’t explain. Yella byn! It’s like I’ve become a child again, without vocabulary to describe a thing!

  One thing is certain. Nathan Howl was brilliant. I think his house is a transdimensional fortress. Something I can use. Not now. Not even in a month from now. But soon. Soon.

  Find it funny how They (the Yllo’tharnah) are trying to get in. I’m trying to get out and They’re trying to get in. Each of us pressing against our respective side of the membrane. A case of greener grass? Or just a singular truism common to both our species: the need to explore, to conquer new territory. To learn, expand and g
row. The need to create and destroy. The evolution of the inner beast. Becoming more of whatever it is we are. Creator, killer, philanthropist . . .

  Just another natural increment in our progression. In the development of gods. They are gods. Not the deaf blind disconnected gods of Incense Street. They are waking gods. Undying. Planning gods. Proximate and looming.

  Sena tucked the notebook between a pillow and her thigh. She picked up the Csrym T and opened it to her mark. Just ahead was another passage about the Last Page.

  She swore.

  The Last Page of what?

  She flipped to the back of the book. It ended like most books, abruptly. There was nothing special about the final page except one small thing.

  Nathaniel Howl had written in his precise scholarly hand: Ha! Clever Pun. And so like tattoos they now seem to me!

  Always another mystery.

  Cameron had told her Nathaniel had gone crazy. Maybe it didn’t mean anything at all.

  She studied through lunch into late afternoon.

  The pages were smooth and cool. Like dead things, the old necromancer’s hand had marked them up. She was starting there, with pencil and ink, with wide margins filled with notes and references.

  “The jellyfish glyph.”

  Sena looked up, startled. An old man’s voice had whispered the words. They scraped along the curves inside her ear, tracing from the outer edges in, sounding like the weird dry brush of a fingertip moving. A sensual exploration, analytic and at once perverse. There was no one in the room.

  The words had been so clear. She had never verbalized them and had written the approximation of them in her notebook for the first time earlier today.

  Could someone have been watching while she wrote?

  Deeply disturbed, she set her studies aside and slipped out of bed. She checked the door first. It was shut tight. Feeling childish, she felt around under the bed. She wanted to remove the shylock, to see with her real eyes that she was alone. She opened the wardrobes, batted around jackets and shirts and dresses until she felt positive no one could be inside. She even checked the windows and the ledges for intruders. All she found was birdlime and chilly air.