The Last Page (23 page)

Sena passes from cognition back into the void.

Toward the end of P
sh, Sena woke slowly.

Silver hoses hung like jewelry in the air. Black silk enrobed the room. It draped her, fell in valances all around. A ray of diamond-colored light struck her midriff, splashing wetly on the creature making love to her naked waist.

The smell-feast’s corpulent red shape had no head. It looked like a scarlet oyster without a shell except for the tendril-like pseudopodia that clutched her abdomen in a hungry embrace. Its peristalsis was slow and hideously erotic.

The silver hoses were for it, pumping in a warm cocktail of drugs and juice. Mindlessly, it fed on the perpetual flow and exosmotically released its waste slime into her blood. Her circulation coursed through the creature’s digestive tract, adding to its color. It was using her heart to pressurize its intestines, force the piped-in nutrients into receptacles in its gut.

If the hoses were unplugged the slow horror would reverse several of its pumps. It would shift from regulation to suction and turn its insatiable hunger back on her. But the Sisterhood’s iatromathematiques were
skilled. The creature’s biorhythm was perfectly controlled. Sena found herself both host and symbiote in the coupling of its stringy arms.

The witches watching her with holomorphic eyes were silent as the smell-feast devoured everything diseased, even the bacteria in her blood. Slowly, over days, the creature filled her with medication it deemed waste, hydrating her with excess water from its food.

Eventually, Megan and one of her iatromathematiques entered the room.

“Shh. Be still.”

With a needle, they introduced a virulent toxin into Sena’s veins. It was poison only for the smell-feast. The creature’s mucus reacted immediately, suturing her veins with a kind of rubber patch, a sealed valve that allowed it to withdraw safely from the pounding pressure of her heart.

No more pain. She must have fallen asleep again.

Megan stood over her with a bundle of scrolls under one arm: glowing, Sena realized, not with happiness but with the euphoria of victory.

“It’s time you had something to do. Time you started preparing.”

“Where am I?”

But Sena recognized the carvings in the walls; the starry fresco smeared eight hundred years ago across the ceiling dome. With the dreamy nocturne playing on the gramophone Sena could be certain they were in parliament.

She sat up, gathering the black silk bedclothes around her. Her head was still foggy and she squinted in the patchy sunlight. “Can I have some water?” Her mouth was dry and she wanted a bath.

“I’ve brought some things for you to study.”

“I’m barely awake.”

Megan flicked her wrist at a young girl in a white smock. “Give her some coffee.”

“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 S
th—”

“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 S
th. 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 W
llin 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 W
llin 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 W
llin 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 H
lid 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.