The Last Page

Maybe her attack in the highlands was related. Maybe she had escaped what others in the Sisterhood had not. Still, Sena remained skeptical.

“Why are they coming after us?”

Megan pursed her lips. Again she hesitated.

“There is an old book. Lost. Possibly in a shop or private collection by now. It was an item of conflict decades ago between the Sisterhood and the Cabal. It slipped through both our hands and wound up in Stonehold until its owner died. No one knows where it is now.”

“So the Cabal . . . the Wllin Droul . . . think we have it?” Sena lied well.

“I don’t think so.”

“Where do you think the book is?” asked Sena.

“Perhaps Stonehold. It might explain why the Wllin Droul have resurfaced there.”

“So you’re sending me to Stonehold to find a book?”

“Things have changed during your illness. As I said, we have several agendas.”

Sena felt her stomach pitch, wondering about Caliph.

“A few days ago,” Megan continued, “a zeppelin was lost in the Valley of Nifol. Shot down. Certain powers in the south had valuables, priceless valuables on board. Which they believe are being ferried into the Duchy of Stonehold.”

“So you’ve made a deal with them? What does the Sisterhood get out of it?”

Megan did not smile her cunning smile as Sena expected. Instead, Megan’s voice cracked, almost quavered. What she said still sounded so pitiless and cruel that Sena winced at the words. “Not yet, Sienae. Until you’ve realized the task before you, I would be giving everything away in the event of your torture.”

Sena reeled for a moment but recovered quickly. She knew it would be useless to persist so she went down a different road. “At the very least I have to know who I’m helping and what I’m helping them achieve.”

This time Megan did smile, albeit unkindly. “For now, all you need know is that we are in league with Pandragor.”

Sena spent five days trying to get back in shape. After morning exercise, she sifted through the newest piles of holomorphic research the Sisterhood had compiled in the vast underpitched barrel vaults of parliament’s basement.

It was frightening stuff.

Holojoules, the raw malleable energy the holomorph drew from blood and dropped into change equations, represented a quantifiable tally of individual annihilations. At a cellular level the number of sacrifices the holomorph needed was astonishing.

Holojoules were naturally limited to the amount of blood in the holomorph’s body. There was an old saying, “You can cast what you can cut,” and it always brought to Sena’s mind gruesome pictures of the greatest holomorphic achievements realized only through suicide.

Yet, according to the notes in the basement, there was another way, an older way. And the Sisterhood had found it. It was spelled out in meticulous ledgers that Sena read, reminding her of stories she had found at Desdae pertaining to hemofurtum and the dead empires that had practiced it. She imagined white curtains stirred by salt winds, sheltering hundreds of spell slaves that had once slit their snowy skins, collecting holomorphic energy into slender silver ewers.

Vast colligations, as they were called: giant collections of silver vials filled with the fluid to argue reality.

After all, holomorphy was a kind of legalese that focused reason through the lens of the mathematician. Holomorphs were reality lawyers whose logic convinced the world to bend.

The Sisterhood’s research covered it all. Sena found slides spotted with various samples of erythrocytes and platelets in stiff paper boxes. She examined them, remembering plant cells under the monocular at Desdae, moving the coarse and substage adjustments. Focusing. Switching through the jumble of parachromatic objectives.

These lacquered brass drawtubes in parliament’s basement were equally powerful and gorgeous, sliding on clock oil under the smooth subtlety of half a dozen finger controls.

At Desdae, she had fumbled in amazement at the squirming glowing life. With the soupspoon mirror condensing light through the slide, thylakoids, vacuoles and chloroplasts had lit up in lucent green, magenta and aqueous blue dyes. She had marveled at each level of magnification, then pricked her finger over a fresh slide and watched herself die.

But hemofurtum made self-mutilation obsolete. The nonphysical numbers in the ledger subtracted against themselves to produce remainders greater than zero. They were capable of snatching iron-rich proteins at the moment of flux. Vampirism.

Hemofurtum’s central equations revolved around a mathematical loop. It was designed to siphon blood from a source outside the holomorph’s own body . . . hold the energy, use some to take again. Its logic was frightening, a kind of gruesome sipping answer to the elusive perpetual motion machine.

Once the reaction began it was up to the holomorph to turn it off. The only limit to the equation was linked to how many pints were available in the vicinity. If the holomorph was willing to siphon or even kill an unlimited amount of people, then the equation’s apogee would be roughly synonymous with population.

Sena left the basement feeling awed and sick.

At noon on the twenty-third, Sena convinced Megan to let her retrieve some things from her cottage in the Highlands. She promised to return in time for her mission to Stonehold.

Sena took a chemiostatic cab toward Jyn Hêl⁸ where her mother had been burned seventeen years ago. No one would question her going in this direction because no one would dare broach the subject of her mother’s death. Jyn Hêl lay close to the Valley of Eloth, close to Tuauch and the hidden Tombs of Aldrn. More importantly, Newlym was on the way. In Newlym, she bought a horse and boarded the only northbound train.

The final stop was Menin’s Pass.

The station was actually closer to Ell’s Lake, a cluster of brick warehouses and fat, decayed mooring towers for airships out of the Duchy.

Sena left the crumbling platform with her horse and melted through the fog. The Highway of Kafree wasn’t part of Miryhr’s official infrastructure. Ruined and bereft, it had been built by one of the north’s fallen empires. After sixty miles it forked. The east arm ran slightly north to Menin’s Pass. The west drooped south toward Esma.

Despite thick fringes of moss and weed, the stone blocks still formed a remarkably serviceable road. And yet, even with the horse, she guessed it would take her two days to reach the place she had hidden the Csrym T.

Sena glanced over her shoulder. Just to be safe, she pulled her sickle knife across her horse’s croup. The creature’s orchid colored skin bled black, six tails expressing anguish in a squirming mass.

“Shh—”

She spoke the Unknown Tongue and the tails drooped. The beast’s withers relaxed.

It didn’t hurt to cover her trail.

Shrdnae Witches tracked by numbers, a kind of dead reckoning based on humidity. If Megan was having her followed, Sena’s pursuers would use coordinates based on the water memories of her own sweat inscribed molecularly into thin air.

She didn’t bother peering for a hidden stalker in the fog. Shrdnae operatives wouldn’t be anywhere she looked. The tiny numbers they cut into their corneas neatly tabled the pre-echoes of what they called blind line of sight.

Sena was in the Seventh House, merited or not, but had decided against making the cuts. Until now, she’d never had a use for better invisibility than what she could manage as a common thief.