The Last Page

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.

“It’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.