The Last Page

¹³

And most dreadful of alclass="underline" .¹⁴

They were words that twisted in the brain, their pronunciations difficult and the depth of the throaty sounds was lost when translated into Trade.

Slowly, Sena composed herself and pulled a book of blank paper and a box of charcoal from her pack. Like a child in the lantern’s halo, she swallowed her fear and began the long task of rubbing over the inscriptions that stretched out into the infinite and eternal blackness below the Ghalla Peaks.

Sena closed out her Sandrenese bank account and converted her money back into gems. City-state police had already been to her cottage once in the past three months. Still, she had to go home. One last time. She left her spare key with Clea and did not say good-bye to Tynan.

When she arrived, she found her cottage more or less how’d she left it with the exception of her missing horse.

“Did you chase away the brigands?” she whispered to Ns. Maybe the police had confiscated her horse.

The cat looked at her quizzically with a high-pitched chirp, not even half a meow. It seemed like a vocalized question mark that asked many things at once.

Sena noticed food items out of place. The note on the corkboard was missing. She opened her cellar. The Fall of Bendain had been taken and her atlas was left open, a page torn out. Her scowl melted into a charmed smile.

Caliph had been here. The papers were right.

No matter that luck had not allowed them to meet. She would be in Stonehold soon enough. A broad smile spread across her face.

She laid the rubbings she had made in the Halls on her table and began picking them apart.

A portion of them originated from chapters found in the Gllin Scrolls. Sena’s mother had brought copies of them from Greenwick to the mainland. The copies now belonged to the Sisterhood, but Sena’s memory was good. She licked her thumb, pulled out a book on Mllic glyphs and thumped it open.

Referencing it often for the difficult phoneticized Jingsade spellings proved nightmarish since the glyphs were organized by shape and grouped by meaning and the phonetic representations in Jingsade gave her little clue what the glyphs themselves might look like.

Intuition and the fragmentary knowledge gleaned from Desdae were her only guides. Still, she formulated a workable translation and copied most of it into a thin journal she could take with her.

What is read will unseal

Twice in bird years.

The times are written

On the Island Scroll that

The skies will open.

Where D’lig strikes

Quietus comes.

And there will be Three

. . .

To Inscribe the Final Page

With the numbers of Nen.

Sena had hoped for more details. She didn’t find this vague bit of verse compelling in the least. What she wanted was something coherent, real hints at what waited between the covers of the book.

“What is read? What is red?” She liked the wordplay. She imagined this reference pointing to the Csrym T. But the homonym didn’t really work in Jingsade.

“Final Page” rang a bell. She had heard that phrase somewhere before. Or maybe she had translated some of it incorrectly. She would have another go at it later. For the moment she was drained.

She shut her journal despondently, gathered up the papers and folded the rubbings in half.

The rubbings went into her pack with the journal. The other notes she took upstairs to the hearth to be burned. As she tossed each page into the flames she noticed how thin Ns looked.

He had been safe here, as she knew he would, but not anymore. He moved cautiously around the kitchen, sniffing the floor with a pecking motion.

Out of habit, she swept the kitchen, ignoring the stains by the door. Then she picked Ns up and left through the broken front door, walking down to the Stones.

From the Porch of Sth she walked lines to a cromlech in southern Miryhr where she stayed at a village under a false name. She put as much distance between herself and the Stones as she could but it didn’t matter.

That night she still dreamt of the rag-thing and of giant spectral shapes coiling in the meadow below her house. She dreamt that starry winds above the Porch filled those ghostly shapes like sails; that they had followed her from the Halls, monstrosities that suffused the sky with close, sweet humidity. They drooled otherworldly secretions, congealing across the Porch and beading on her home.

In the dream, she could feel them gazing at her without true eyes, across dimensions, slavering mouthlessly. Only the weakest of their kind had mouths. The book had drawn them. Maybe Megan was right. Maybe she had drawn their attention by binding one of them to the cottage. But she didn’t doubt, with the Csrym T in her pack, at some point the Yllo’tharnah would have found her just the same.

¹¹ A controversial prophetic text said by some to list every year since 337 W.C. by name. Yacob’s Roll ends at 563 “Y.o.T. Sealed Scroll,” supposedly marking the end of the world.

¹² U.T. Approximate pronunciation: Yillo’tharnah.

¹³ U.T. Approximate pronunciation: Thay’gn.

¹⁴ U.T. Approximate pronunciation: Nayn.

CHAPTER 13

Public surgery happened on a regular basis in Tin Crow. When the gutters of Bloodsump Lane ran thick and red it meant someone had gone under the knife.

Body fluids and knots of clotted blood slithered through little eyebrow grates, dumping directly into shallow channels that bordered the street. Sometimes scrubby strips of flesh would snag on the bars. They dangled stubbornly and slapped about in the ichors that issued from crowded moldy buildings.

Sometimes it was a slow steady trickle. Other times it came in waves as though someone were sloshing hidden mistakes out with a mop.

For a silver bek, a gentleman and his lady could purchase tickets and gain admittance, not through the gory back alleys but through slightly more professional front doors where gaslights flared on the names of well-known surgeons and grime was kept to a minimum.

Large panes of frosted glass glowed with snowy whiteness on all sides of Grouselich Hospital’s doors.

Nearby, a voluminous glass tube, lit from within, hung beside the brass-lettered names and cast unpleasant patterns on the bricks below. Filled with some clear fluid, through which a stream of heavier red liquid fell, the tube gurgled and hummed.

A line of men and women had gathered, the head of which showed tickets to a bald man with a white mustache and a black suit. He had just unlocked the doors. The line of people shifted. Some watched the red liquid ebb through the tube while others whispered about what speculative horrors their tickets might grant them access on this particular night.

All of them had heard about arms being sawn off, eyes replaced with lenses poured from glass, and the gruesome, mysterious term well worth the silvery price of admission: brain surgery.

Everyone was giddy because everyone knew that unlike the opera, where murders and intrigue happened right before their eyes, this was for real.

Slowly, the line edged toward the doors as the mustachioed man examined each ticket with care. He took them and turned them over, peered down his nose like a jeweler examining diamonds. Finally he made a precise tear in each one and handed it back to the bearer, motioning for them to step through the portal and into the unsettling cone of antiseptic light.