The Last Page (87 page)

“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 Y
llo’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.

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.

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 by
n! What am I doing?
Her stomach turned. She put the instrument down and looked at the
C
srym 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
C
srym 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
C
srym 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.