The Last Page

A square of cloudy sky grumbled overhead. Despite the crushing cold, she wasted no time pulling herself up.

The turret’s architecture formed a small octagon, obscure and shadowed by the castle’s walls. From its solitary rooftop she gazed down on Stonehold wrapped in snow from a perspective that obscured the city.

To the north there was something black, as if a giant had thrown a fistful of mud at the castle wall. It clung, oblique, opaque, hiding in the gloom of the castle’s own acre-wide shadow. The air around it trembled as though thick fumes like fuel vapor, heavier than air, drooled out of it and down across the frozen moat. That, or parts of its shape were slavering back out of physical space, into the ether.

“Why are You here?” she whispered.

The massive thing did not move. It wavered. It writhed almost and seemed to slurp at the sky even though it made no sound. It did not move from its position on the wall. A point of light, exquisitely bright, shivered in its central void, surrounded by other lights, all of them the color of welding sparks. Its exact shape was impossible to tell, even for Sena’s eyes, because it seemed to have an invalid structure. The more she looked, the more it occurred to her that it was somehow imploded, a re-entrant polygon, though softened and organic, a mushy concavity or hole rather than any shape at all. Light bent around it. It exuded cold.

One of Them. One of the Thae’gn. Maybe it was the one she had bound to protect her at the Porch of Sth, responsible for utterly discreating the flawless Lua’grc that had attacked her in her home. Maybe it was from the Halls under Sandren. One of the Hidden. A black lump of mucus, a cancer of space. Gleaming.

The lights inside it fizzled in and out of sight except for the great one at its center. Like a cell, that bright gleaming nucleolus surrounded by cosmic black cytoplasm, shimmering lysosomes . . .

She was making up metaphors primarily because she had the feeling that, even with her new eyes, she wasn’t seeing it correctly, as if the gigantic thing refused to translate properly through any kind of sight.

There was no communication from it. Nothing she could sense, except for the logical assumption that it had been drawn here by the book . . . just like its lesser cousin whose head hung in the great hall. Sena envisioned more of them, attracted by the Csrym T, cementing themselves like barnacles to Isca Castle, great abysmal vacuums of them. Deep plastered colonies of empty holes, drawing together like negative cells, building a gulf of tissue, a void, a parody of oyster flesh around a pearl, growing over the irritation of the book.

Maybe.

In truth she had no idea why it was here or what the book meant to it.

The incomprehensible smell of the thing washed over her. So sweet. Like rose flesh. Like a flower she had never smelled before. It was cloying. Overpowering.

Maybe her proof, her bolt aimed at Megan, had drawn it. After all, it was the first time she had taken numbers from the Csrym T and turned them into holomorphic force. Again, it was just a guess. Her legs felt weak. Her body modulated, softening as if subject to wavelengths emanating from its core. She had the unpleasant memory of Megan’s hex at Deep Cloister and felt like she might wobble apart, muscles waggling free of her bones.

Is this an attack? Or am I simply too close? Like trying to swallow a strandy web of phlegm at the back of her throat, Sena had to concentrate on simple systems. She couldn’t walk; it felt like she was standing in pudding. Her thoughts slowed.

Maybe the head of the Cl’cr’Nok, hanging in the great hall, had drawn it. But would something so powerful and different from its physical cousin hold a grudge? Would it even care about murder?

Sena didn’t know. She had no answers as she stood, trapped, feeling its cold, unseen secretions envelop her like gelatin.

There was a potion in her belt. Hemofurtum, she thought dully and reached for it with exaggerated sluggishness. She had kept it close in anticipation of the formula that would help Caliph win. She had been planning to perform it . . . right now . . . or earlier. She couldn’t remember. Why hadn’t she done it earlier? Instead of wandering aimlessly through the castle halls?

She didn’t know.

She pried the potion’s cap off like a clumsy drunk and watched the crimson fluid purl upward in the air. That shouldn’t be happening, she thought dreamily.

A shadow, like a brushstroke, had appeared beside her. It hung just above the left side of the battlement in her peripheral sight, smoky and gaunt and curled. Black, with a vague wisp of white hair and within it, a hint of cimmerian eyes, burning through the cold, staring across the empty gulf between the tourelle and the thing that boiled on the wall.

“Nathan?” she asked. But the specter only watched. Sena felt like laughing, everything was so bizarre. She opened her mouth to speak, trying to gather holojoules from the weightless potion. Panic. She couldn’t breathe. The heavy invisible slime poured into her mouth. Into her nose and throat. She couldn’t speak. She struggled. She thought she heard an old man humming far away.

Sena twisted as her feet came loose from the stone. She flailed. Floating. Fighting for her life. She couldn’t hold her breath any longer, she began to choke. As the jellied air poured in, deep inside her throat, she felt something bite.

On the side of the castle, the godling-stain bubbled, a black honeycomb of flesh pouring from its hole, plasmoid, tentacular, hideously fast, a complex mollusk unfolding.

The black pseudopodia foamed toward her, silent as thrown ink, glistening with deep cribriform patterns. There was a burst of prurient pink, an outward thrust of bright color trimming those impossible lobes. The pseudopodia didn’t move in concert. They were not like the anemones from Desdae’s biology labs or any other creature with a cognizant grasp. The outpouring flesh, if it was flesh, moved like an abruption . . . like something that had exploded from a wound. Mentally, Sena screamed.

The blood potion floated in front of her like the glowing tube at Grouselich Hospital, the disgorged red contents hovered, roiled, and remained suspended. Her eyes glazed, her throat relaxed, the slime-thick air poured into her lungs. Something bit deeper, like serrated teeth, slicing into the soft tissue of her pharynx, biting, slicing, she could taste her own blood.

Those ebbing holojoules . . . waiting for her voice. She thought of Megan’s transumption hex, of the Devourer: Gr-ner Shie.

In the distance, the sound of thunder or zeppelin guns tortured the sky. Sena’s body convulsed from lack of oxygen . . . the black flesh was all around her. And she was floating, stuttering. Catapult. Zoetrope. Where was Caliph? The Thae’gn’s sweet mucus filled her sinuses with incomprehensible alien dreaming, scent-shadows of her own death. The curl of smoke that was shaped like an old man did nothing.

Snow fell. Odd. It seemed unaffected by the thick air. Her vision was blurring. Then suddenly, she was assaulted from every direction, both internally as well as all across her skin. Her jacket tore away in parallel strips. Her clothing disintegrated. She could suddenly breathe but the pain was exquisite. Black tendrils sliced gill-like slits into her skin. Those arms that looked so slippery, surprisingly powerful . . . and rough. Like coarse sandpaper grit. They snagged and tore at reality. She could see them shredding the fiber of space with every subtle movement that they made, reality turning to mist, threadbare wisps that dispersed slightly, revealing glimpses of someplace else . . . someplace hidden . . . hovering just behind. Space closed as the arms moved, re-weaving, healing, but vaguely warped . . . vaguely scarred.