The Last Page

by Anthony Huso

  “Coffee? I want water and a toothbrush.”

  Megan scowled. “We know what attacked you in the Highlands of Tue, Sienae. We just don’t understand why. I warned you about the Porch of Sth—”

  “The Porch saved my life. I had a binding . . .”

  “A binding!” Megan nearly dropped the coffee that the child had moments ago put into her hand. “Sienae, you don’t stitch bindings to the Porch of Sth. You can’t—”

  “It saved my life, Mother!”

  “I . . . saved your life!” Megan fired. “Ridiculous girl. You’re going to get yourself killed with holomorphy like that.” She took a brisk sip of her coffee. “The Wllin Droul found you, which means you’re a pathetic field agent. But you should be safe in Isca Castle.”

  “I’ll leave immediately.”

  Megan ignored her bitter tone. “We aren’t ready yet. You must leave when the timing is right.”

  Sena’s face slumped into her hands. She stared between her fingers as leafy shadows from outside fell over the pair of blond girls stationed nearby. Initiates, about twelve years old, they stared blankly at each other while the breeze levitated their hair.

  Megan circled around behind and started helping her with her bra, scrutinizing the lacy undergarment. “That’s a bit of black evil, isn’t it? Where did you get it?”

  “Ghalla Gala, in Sandren. What are your plans? What are we doing in Stonehold?”

  Megan hesitated. Sena saw the shadow of her arm rise up and quickly stretch across the floor. The young girls in the room left immediately. They pulled the door shut behind them. It made a dull bang followed by a vast hollow echo.

  Megan continued. “We have several agendas. The Wllin Droul has resurfaced. Evidenced by your attack. Half-sisters in Isca say an old school is reforming in the undercity. We do not know why. Hopefully you can help us discover this once you are there.”

  “Who do you have in Isca?”

  “Miriam.”

  Sena sniffed disdainfully. “You aren’t sending me to Stonehold just to play cloak and dagger with some smelly little clerics.”

  “No. But that would be enough,” said Megan. “Your inexperience combined with this mystagogic society out of Iycestoke . . . well, they’re far more than smelly little clerics. They have preternarcomancers that sleep beyond sleep in warm coastal waters and perceive farther than—”

  “If they’re so good at predicting the future,” Sena interrupted, “how did they get themselves butchered seventy years ago in their own temple? By a general they employed?”

  Megan scowled. “We’re happy to have some historical proof that they do make mistakes. But the Wllin Droul go back. Thousands of years. Discounting them is an old mistake.”

  “Thousands?” Sena scowled.

  Megan began to pace in the spacious domed room, heels clicking loudly. “Yes, well. It wasn’t that long ago that the king of Sandren bore the Hlid Mark.”

  Sena knew what that meant: the mark that shadowed the navel, three dark tendrils reaching upward.

  “We wonder if they might be trying to infiltrate the Sisterhood.”

  “Why would you think that?” Sena thought back to the rag-thing at her cottage and her flesh tingled with cold.

  Megan stopped pacing. She faced Sena directly and her eyes burnt like tiny gray stars. She spoke barely above a whisper. “Some of our Sisters have died or disappeared. Wives of powerful men have been lost in the woods, run away with charming highwaymen or, according to the papers, fallen down stairs and snapped their necks.”

  Her obvious skepticism added a new dimension to the discussion.

  Sena raised her eyebrows. Considering the laws of the coven and the inordinate amount of physical dexterity it took to become a full-fledged Sister, such stories (while convincing to the general public) were ludicrous to a member of the Sisterhood.

  They must be fearless, thought Sena. The more she thought about it, the more likely it seemed that someone could be laughing.

  Through the antiseptic words of a journalist some entity might certainly be able to flaunt that it, or they, had attacked the Sisterhood in their most ensconced locations, beaten them at their own game. By publishing absurd accounts of accidents and capricious infidelity, things a highly trained Sister would easily and doggedly avoid, the enemy could broadcast in words clear only to the Sisterhood: we know where you are. We know how to find you.

  Sena imagined the results. It would be like turning off lamps in a vast house. When the undercover wife of a regional lord vanished the very eyes of the Sisterhood would be plucked out of that household. The holdings of the Sisterhood would become darkened and obscure.

  Maybe her attack in the highlands was related. Maybe she had escaped what others in the Sisterhood had not. Still, Sena remained skeptical.

  “Why are they coming after us?”

  Megan pursed her lips. Again she hesitated.

  “There is an old book. Lost. Possibly in a shop or private collection by now. It was an item of conflict decades ago between the Sisterhood and the Cabal. It slipped through both our hands and wound up in Stonehold until its owner died. No one knows where it is now.”

  “So the Cabal . . . the Wllin Droul . . . think we have it?” Sena lied well.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Where do you think the book is?” asked Sena.

  “Perhaps Stonehold. It might explain why the Wllin Droul have resurfaced there.”

  “So you’re sending me to Stonehold to find a book?”

  “Things have changed during your illness. As I said, we have several agendas.”

  Sena felt her stomach pitch, wondering about Caliph.

  “A few days ago,” Megan continued, “a zeppelin was lost in the Valley of Nifol. Shot down. Certain powers in the south had valuables, priceless valuables on board. Which they believe are being ferried into the Duchy of Stonehold.”

  “So you’ve made a deal with them? What does the Sisterhood get out of it?”

  Megan did not smile her cunning smile as Sena expected. Instead, Megan’s voice cracked, almost quavered. What she said still sounded so pitiless and cruel that Sena winced at the words. “Not yet, Sienae. Until you’ve realized the task before you, I would be giving everything away in the event of your torture.”

  Sena reeled for a moment but recovered quickly. She knew it would be useless to persist so she went down a different road. “At the very least I have to know who I’m helping and what I’m helping them achieve.”

  This time Megan did smile, albeit unkindly. “For now, all you need know is that we are in league with Pandragor.”

  Sena spent five days trying to get back in shape. After morning exercise, she sifted through the newest piles of holomorphic research the Sisterhood had compiled in the vast underpitched barrel vaults of parliament’s basement.

  It was frightening stuff.

  Holojoules, the raw malleable energy the holomorph drew from blood and dropped into change equations, represented a quantifiable tally of individual annihilations. At a cellular level the number of sacrifices the holomorph needed was astonishing.

  Holojoules were naturally limited to the amount of blood in the holomorph’s body. There was an old saying, “You can cast what you can cut,” and it always brought to Sena’s mind gruesome pictures of the greatest holomorphic achievements realized only through suicide.

  Yet, according to the notes in the basement, there was another way, an older way. And the Sisterhood had found it. It was spelled out in meticulous ledgers that Sena read, reminding her of stories she had found at Desdae pertaining to hemofurtum and the dead empires that had practiced it. She imagined white curtains stirred by salt winds, sheltering hundreds of spell slaves that had once slit their snowy skins, collecting holomorphic energy into slender silver ewers.

  Vast colligations, as they were called: giant collections of silver vials filled with the fluid to argue reality.

  After all, holomorphy was a kind of legalese that focuse
d reason through the lens of the mathematician. Holomorphs were reality lawyers whose logic convinced the world to bend.

  The Sisterhood’s research covered it all. Sena found slides spotted with various samples of erythrocytes and platelets in stiff paper boxes. She examined them, remembering plant cells under the monocular at Desdae, moving the coarse and substage adjustments. Focusing. Switching through the jumble of parachromatic objectives.

  These lacquered brass drawtubes in parliament’s basement were equally powerful and gorgeous, sliding on clock oil under the smooth subtlety of half a dozen finger controls.

  At Desdae, she had fumbled in amazement at the squirming glowing life. With the soupspoon mirror condensing light through the slide, thylakoids, vacuoles and chloroplasts had lit up in lucent green, magenta and aqueous blue dyes. She had marveled at each level of magnification, then pricked her finger over a fresh slide and watched herself die.

  But hemofurtum made self-mutilation obsolete. The nonphysical numbers in the ledger subtracted against themselves to produce remainders greater than zero. They were capable of snatching iron-rich proteins at the moment of flux. Vampirism.

  Hemofurtum’s central equations revolved around a mathematical loop. It was designed to siphon blood from a source outside the holomorph’s own body . . . hold the energy, use some to take again. Its logic was frightening, a kind of gruesome sipping answer to the elusive perpetual motion machine.

  Once the reaction began it was up to the holomorph to turn it off. The only limit to the equation was linked to how many pints were available in the vicinity. If the holomorph was willing to siphon or even kill an unlimited amount of people, then the equation’s apogee would be roughly synonymous with population.

  Sena left the basement feeling awed and sick.

  At noon on the twenty-third, Sena convinced Megan to let her retrieve some things from her cottage in the Highlands. She promised to return in time for her mission to Stonehold.

  Sena took a chemiostatic cab toward Jyn Hêl8 where her mother had been burned seventeen years ago. No one would question her going in this direction because no one would dare broach the subject of her mother’s death. Jyn Hêl lay close to the Valley of Eloth, close to Tuauch and the hidden Tombs of Aldrn. More importantly, Newlym was on the way. In Newlym, she bought a horse and boarded the only northbound train.

  The final stop was Menin’s Pass.

  The station was actually closer to Ell’s Lake, a cluster of brick warehouses and fat, decayed mooring towers for airships out of the Duchy.

  Sena left the crumbling platform with her horse and melted through the fog. The Highway of Kafree wasn’t part of Miryhr’s official infrastructure. Ruined and bereft, it had been built by one of the north’s fallen empires. After sixty miles it forked. The east arm ran slightly north to Menin’s Pass. The west drooped south toward Esma.

  Despite thick fringes of moss and weed, the stone blocks still formed a remarkably serviceable road. And yet, even with the horse, she guessed it would take her two days to reach the place she had hidden the Csrym T.

  Sena glanced over her shoulder. Just to be safe, she pulled her sickle knife across her horse’s croup. The creature’s orchid colored skin bled black, six tails expressing anguish in a squirming mass.

  “Shh—”

  She spoke the Unknown Tongue and the tails drooped. The beast’s withers relaxed.

  It didn’t hurt to cover her trail.

  Shrdnae Witches tracked by numbers, a kind of dead reckoning based on humidity. If Megan was having her followed, Sena’s pursuers would use coordinates based on the water memories of her own sweat inscribed molecularly into thin air.

  She didn’t bother peering for a hidden stalker in the fog. Shrdnae operatives wouldn’t be anywhere she looked. The tiny numbers they cut into their corneas neatly tabled the pre-echoes of what they called blind line of sight.

  Sena was in the Seventh House, merited or not, but had decided against making the cuts. Until now, she’d never had a use for better invisibility than what she could manage as a common thief.

  Unfortunately, if Megan had put a tail on her, that wouldn’t be enough. She rolled the horse blood into a hemofurtive equation, testing the new concept she’d learned in parliament’s basement, and laid a jumbled trail of numbers in her wake. In answer to water memory, she encrypted air.

  On her second day in the Valley of Eloth she left her horse to fend, marching downhill from the road until she found a set of abandoned stone huts near a lake. Ragged green thickets grew in profusion along the shore. She hugged the waterline and made good progress. Her side still pained her and she rested often but a gnawing anxiety filled her stomach. Eloth belonged to long-toothed predacious things.

  Sarchal hounds, with jaws capable of killing a horse, hunted the wilds. And there were other horrors. Enormous black otter-things with tiny malevolent eyes and twitching ears, long dark muzzles bristling with whiskers and gharial teeth. Unknown numbers of them lay in wait below these northern lakes.

  Sena kept her eyes open and moved quickly. The undergrowth gave her no choice but to skirt the shore. Eventually the pebbled beach gave way to a shadowed drop-off overhung with flowering thickets. She could see several large fish, backs like dull battered tin, gliding in the murk below.

  She scrambled up a soft embankment and found an animal track that led her back to the water through a garden of cattails that sprang from semisolid ground.

  She tread carefully on the shifting sod of what seemed to be floating dirt and vegetation. The rich close stench of metholinate burbled up through black, snot-thick water. She couldn’t see four inches down.

  After half an hour, breathing through her mouth, the cattails thinned and the track emerged but ended in disappointment.

  Sena looked with disgust at a stinking morass of deep feculent mud and squalid pools. Ruby-bellied reed flies darted through the vapor. The mire looked impossible to cross and her trail had given out far from shore.

  Her eyes cast about for a way of crossing the muck and landed on a series of large flat rocks. They were east of her, farther out, vulnerable to one of the otter-things but she knew she could leap the distance between them without much strain and decided to risk it.

  The hungry flies swarmed, bellies like gemstones. She leapt to the first then the second and in such fashion crossed the inlet.

  The insects pursued her until she reached the top of a slide of boulders at the lake’s north end. There, the storm front struck relentlessly and a cold freshet of wind swept the flies back down to their reeking hollows by the lake.

  Sena worked her way above the skree.

  She moved gracefully. She was trained for this.

  After three thousand vertical feet and five miles, the spires and dome of Esma rose slowly into view. It was an ancient thing. Ugly and old like a fractured skull.

  She checked her watch as the first small drops of rain began to fall.

  From here she could see most of the valley in ominous panorama. All around her, the mountains rose in tortured gray piles, blasted back from the valley’s pit as if by a synchronized cacophony of screams.

  Sena climbed into a flat barren clearing before the desolate temple. Perspiration licked tight curls along her neck.

  The whole of Esma had been raised in cryte, a white rock that held light like velvet. But the closer she got the grayer it looked. Ruinous after eighteen thousand years of storms, if it had not been for the cryte’s extraordinary granite-surpassing durability, the whole edifice would have dissolved like a sugar lump. As it was, great chunks had given way. Unseen blocks and entire substructures had slid cataclysmically down with the skree into the lake.

  As if someone had plunged broken femurs into the ground, jagged fragile towers, sundered and hollow, stretched with ghastly luxuriance toward the sky. The ruptured dome, graven and blackened by its own encrusted ornateness, pushed fatly at the towers that buttressed its enormous weight. Almost against gravity it seemed to hold togethe
r, bulging and loose, gawping and precarious to enter.

  Sena watched swallows float in and out of Esma’s orifices. They cast fluid shadows over friezes in the walls.

  Inside the immense foyer, leaves and twigs shuffled in the gloom. She entered one of the gargantuan rooms that opened off to either side. In the vaulted space, walnuts rotted in the shadows and the floor had been decorated with inlays.

  A vague uneasiness smothered everything. Though the designs were striking, hundreds of long sharp-edged lids overshadowed their beauty. Sunk in the foundations, designed as part of Esma’s vast floor plan, over two hundred crypts rested underfoot. Their lids rose, low, oblique and sharp across the spacious floor.

  Sena had walked lines from her cottage to this very spot. There were old stories written in the walls of Esma, vague frightening prophecies. But Sena could not afford to be superstitious. She had been desperate. And in desperation she had hidden the Csrym T before stumbling down to find her sisters by the lake. Myhr through Psh, when the weather was typically mild, the Sisterhood could be found in Eloth, delving into the past, unearthing things from the ruins near Ryhd l.9 Even so, with the rash of thunderstorms, she had almost missed them.

  It was just as well that Caliph hadn’t followed her here. He would have found the ruins empty.

  She bent over one of the elegant lids that decorated the floor and pushed. It ground away to reveal a dark trough. The bones inside had dried and long since lost their odor.

  She found her pack just where she had left it, crouched in a corner by the yellow feet. She pulled it out, loosening the buckles.

  The crimson book slid smoothly into her palms, leather soft and cool against her fingertips.

  “Megan’s looking for you,” she whispered to it.

  Almost reassuringly, the faint howl that only she could hear floated up onto the moldy draft. Outside, the sky flickered. Thunder rolled like a boulder over the Javneh Mountains and sweet-smelling water began to trickle from cracks a hundred feet overhead.

  Sena didn’t give a damn about Megan and her errands. All she wanted was to open the book. And Caliph remained her best chance of that. Now Megan actually wants me stargazing over his shoulder! And I was worried about fårn10at Desdae!