The Last Page

Time stutterd.

Snow or ash dwindled beyond the windows.

People stirred. Men in red coats. Cycles of light and dark. Sena’s eyelids fluttered open just in time to catch a dark shadow flicking over the room as a sheet of melting snow fell past the glass. She heard whispers.

“The High King is dead.”

The story came to her in pieces. His airship had left the battle, racing back to Isca in an effort save his life. The details were still foggy. A hawk had brought a note stating that Caliph had needed transfusions and surgery. Stat. The Byun-Ghala had escaped granulation, only to be hit by Saergaeth’s smaller front coming from the east. That offensive had stopped quickly when it was realized that Saergaeth himself had been vaporized with the rest of his fleet. But it was too late. By the time they surrendered, the Byun-Ghala had already been hit, crippled, crushed against the castle.

Sena sat up in Caliph’s bed. A doctor in a red coat looked at her from across the room with a terrified expression. She saw the Herald on a nearby stand, read the headlines in the largest, boldest typeface available to the press. Three words covered the entire page.

HIGH KING SLAIN! And below it: BRT VANISHED LIKE FALLOW DOWN! Perhaps people will start calling the town “Burnt” even though it doesn’t rhyme, like they call Fallow Down, “Fallen Down,” like Stonehavians have always used humor to deal with crippling loss.

What? How could she think about that! How could she be distracted from the headlines proclaiming Caliph’s death? There was a low ringing like tinnitus: musicians in the grand hall, she realized, playing subtle fugues. Why was the doctor staring at her so strangely?

Sena looked through the walls of the bedroom to where the High King’s body lay surrounded by several thousand candles that melted the grand hall into a dignified but ritualistic-looking cave. Around him, tapestries hung like chthonic draperies and flowstone.

Gadriel entered the bedroom. His eyes were red and frightened, devoid of their usual brightness. He nodded to her, almost shaking, and placed several embossed envelopes on a tortoiseshell table before stepping backward, shrinking, almost creeping away.

“Condolences are pouring in,” he whispered.

Am I . . . gods, what’s happening?

“Gadriel?”

His answer to her question was tense and fearful. “You are the queen. The Council, what is left of it, called a meeting . . . last night. With the exception of General Yrisl, all of our ranking officers are . . .” He stopped.

Obviously there were too many details to explain. Too much horror behind the reason. “You are queen of Stonehold, my . . . lady. According to the vote.”

Impossible! They would never . . .

Gadriel and the physician left the room, not waiting for her reply.

Sena got up. A whisper etched the air inside her left ear. Nothing intelligible. The gas lamps had been put out until shipments of metholinate could be resumed. There were candles all around. She took a bath, got dressed and sat down in front of her vanity. She stared into her eyes where the black islands of her pupils had been buried under a brilliant flood and then, slowly, took notice of her skin. There were markings, shimmering and pale, nearly invisible. Distinctly, from far away, she could hear an old man’s voice . . . humming.

“Ha! Clever Pun. And so like tattoos they now seem to me!” His voice sounded whimsical.

She echoed it. Whispered it to herself. “The Last Page.”

The memory was hard to grasp, sleek and slithery, the instant that the sky had gone wild, but pieces of what had happened were falling into place. The gill-like slits . . . her body opening like a flower . . .

These tattoos must be the scars! But they’re so . . . beautiful!

Head to toe, they covered her. Fully healed into elegant designs. What had the Thae’gn been trying to do? Strike that! What did it do . . . to me?

Something was wrong.

She had just realized that she wasn’t breathing. She was sitting at the mirror, thinking . . . not breathing. Frightened, she drew air in through her nose. She could feel it pull down into her throat, cool, crisp, she could feel it filling her lungs, a pleasant chilly expansion. Relieved, she noticed that she could smell. She could smell so acutely that it reminded her of when she had been a child. The faint dampness of the wood at the windowsill. The pleasant waft of her perfume bottles and lipstick tubes. And then she realized that she wasn’t breathing again.

She inhaled. Exhaled. Inhaled. Exhaled. Everything worked. She stopped. Seconds passed. No panic. She flipped open her watch. A minute passed. Nothing. Five minutes passed without a breath. She didn’t need to breathe.

She remembered the terrified expression on the doctor’s face, the way Gadriel had seemed frightened of her. What’s happened to me?

She checked her pulse.

Nothing.

She felt under her chin, cupped her hand under her left breast. Nothing. She felt herself. She was warm, except for the tattoos. Fear rising, she took a hat pin from her vanity and stabbed her finger.

It didn’t bleed. It didn’t even hurt.

She rubbed her fingers together. They weren’t numb. She could feel the brush of one against the other. She found her kyru and sliced into her palm.

For a moment, the flesh parted, but she had the distinct impression that it had done so only because she had desired it to happen. There wasn’t any blood. Shocked, she sliced again, deeper. The skin parted without pain, showing perfect pink muscle tissue all the way to the bone. The skin fell back together without so much as a mark. Not a trace. Perfectly whole.

And she wasn’t breathing.

She examined her tattoo-scars in the mirror, the way they carved her up with screaming lovely poems. She recognized the designs from the Csrym T. Inti’Drou glyphs. The Thae’gn had written on her.

Slowly it began sinking in that the entity hadn’t actually attacked her. Even when her intestines had been dangling in the wind and her skin had been flayed open like a tattered kite, it had never attacked her. It had done something on its own, outside her small sphere of logic, like a lab technician re-engineering some small speck of life in order to study it. And then, They had used her.

It felt mysterious and sinister but mostly it felt invasive. What did They do to me?

But, in the same self-exploratory moment, Sena felt like she could already answer that question.

Caliph’s ships had held the brunt of Saergaeth’s armies at bay, gathering them, holding them in one place where Gr-ner Shie’s mindless gluttony could stop dead the entirety of the war. In that respect, Caliph’s plan had been a success. Precisely timed, the Abomination from outside reality had transmogrified her, even her vocal cords, giving her the ability to pronounce the glyphs.

The beacon had gone up, called forth the Devourer. By destroying Saergaeth’s army, by destroying everything, it had put an end to the threat of Sena’s removal from Stonehold. Or rather, it had ensured that the Csrym T would stay where it was, safely ensconced at Isca Castle, and that it would remain in Sena’s possession, with time purchased for her to continue studying its contents.

Once the threat had been eliminated, the Thae’gn that had written on her skin had removed Gr-ner Shie from the equation, before it could reach the object of its hunger, before it could devour the newest owner of the C