The Last Page

She clutched a column. It was cool and empty. She fell inside and tumbled up its vacuous length. Not stone. Soluble as gas. Maybe she was vapor. Maybe she didn’t exist at all.

The tuning staff’s wavelengths broadened, as though its own substance were being altered, vibrating at a lower frequency. She couldn’t hear it anymore. She could feel it.

Shut it off! she thought. You stupid fucking beldam! Shut it off! She staggered into pudding again, somersaulted through a thicket of black empty columns.

As if in answer to her unspoken demand, there was the faint sound of stone shivering from hundreds of miles or alternate dimensions away. Something came apart beneath a sonic blow. Shards blew. Ricocheted off walls and underground passageways.

Then the machine faltered and the tubing on the staff broke loose under enormous pressure, frequency, vibration, sound, hoses whipping. They left wakes of vapor like white millipedes in air.

Sena couldn’t see it except during the split instant when the air returned to normal and the Sisterhood fell to the ground. The women’s retching ended as pillars reverted to solid stone. Sena had made it out of the hypostyle.

But in the real world, the summer breeze had grown thick and cold like it sometimes did by the Porch of Sth, like the black nitrous air in the Halls below Sandren.

The clouds over the hypostyle were spinning in a tight whorl and the huge columns shone with ghastly, almost invisible halos.

Sena had to crouch against the wind or be blown over. As she fought, a fetid reek began to fill her lungs. Electricity pulsed overhead. Her robe shredded along strange geometric lines, like paper torn along a crease. She realized her boots were lost, possibly entombed forever in one of the columns, only when her bare foot came down on something cold and wet. Sena saw a salamander lying in the grass.

Its wet skin flickered in the nearly constant lightning, looking pale and ghastly. Its head was crushed open and it stank. Slapping noises struck down all around her in the grass. Frogs, salamanders, even fish falling from the sky.

Screams lost in the storm. Women running this way and that. Some curled into balls in the grass, arms thrown over their heads.

Hail.

A blast of wind picked Sena up and dragged her over the lawn. She clawed her way just lee of a garden statue, listening to the faint tinkle of breaking windows overhead.

Great white chunks of ice bounced in the lawn, seeming to pop up out of the ground. One of the hailstones struck a girl in the shoulder. They are falling. All of them . . . are falling.

This is a transumption hex. Using numbers. Taking Gr-ner Shie: the Faceless One, from one place? To another? Sundered distant stones. Stars that form a prison. Far beyond the Ncrpa.

I am drugged.

I am falling.

¹⁶ U.T. Approximate pronunciation: “Quem sah-aydl-ntah hkdlim!”

INTERLUDE

The Key

There are legends that fabulize the first time the Csrym Tlocked itself, just after Davishok and the Rain of Fire. Sena reads them at Desdae. She discovers how the Tamaraith, that legendary Ublisi, was forced to unseal her own book in the aftermath of a terrible disaster. A terrible mistake.

While the pipes from the boiler stir Caliph’s dreams she examines an unusual account from a general turned historian who lived nearly a century ago. In it, he provides his own translation of inscriptions he supposedly found in the Jungles of hloht that tell how darkness came to Sth. He can’t present the carvings to the ISSA,¹⁷he says, because they were lost along with most of his gear in a Veyden ambush.

No one takes him seriously.

A week of ridicule in scientific journals ends with the mass murder of a sect of priests that investigators say financed his expeditions. He flees back to the jungles and though pursued, is never apprehended.

Sena glosses the cutting and turns to another of the man’s manuscripts which details (again by unsubstantiated translations) the Csrym T’s lock. She skips halfway down the page.

“. . . Last inscription makes it sound like a woman at a restaurant checking the time, waiting for the man that never comes. With disuse it withdraws into sulking; it has to be coaxed again with a sign of fidelity, a sign of unwavering commitment. Because there is no key.”

There has never been a key, reads Sena. Nor are the lock’s tumblers rusted from neglect. They are rusted from use. According to his account, which Sena copies word for word, the holomorphic lock drinks blood.

It is bizarre. And it gets worse, a bathetic bit of recipe seemingly concocted by someone who knows nothing about real holomorphy.

Sena laughs when she reads it.

It is sentimental garbage. She begins to side with the general’s critics. He is a sham, a homicidal huckster selling trinkets from the jungle.

But then she reads the other clipping.

A story from a journalist out of Stonehold whose story had been republished in an anthology. It recounted a woman’s complaint, filed sixty-one years before, about a man, her lover, who had assaulted her, cut her. Sena is captivated. The dates, the names of those implicated cross-reference easily with something else she knows: the only account of the last person to open the Csrym T.

She goes back to the general’s recipe and copies it precisely. Her mind is spinning.

In the darkened library something besides Caliph’s breathing makes noise, a sudden itching in her ear. She turns but there is nothing.

Sena re-reads what she has copied.

1 ampoule of thy true love’s blood taken by theft.

1 ampoule of thy own blood taken with silver.

1 hunk of dead man’s hair taken only in spring or autumn time.

1 ampoule of water blest in the church of Thool.

2 leaves of Trindixahht and meat of the tantun nut.

A strange argument follows whose numbers, even to Sena, make little sense. She has read it many times since Desdae. Its meaning has grown. She recognizes part of it now as a form of hemofurtum. She carries it in her pack with the Csrym T.

The morning after the hex, she washes the black out of her hair and leaves Skellum. The Sisterhood is in disarray. Megan is ill, sleeping with a smell-feast. Sena tells Haidee she is going to Stonehold to spy on the High King in accordance with Megan’s wishes.

No one argues or tells her it is unsafe.

Haidee arranges for an electric cab to take her as far as Jyn Hêl.¹⁸The starlines there will take her to Stonehold.

From her tower window, Giganalee watched Sena go. She had not approved of Megan’s decision to sell a transumption hex to Pandragor. Such holomorphy was unpredictable and Giganalee felt certain that the Pandragonians could not even fully understand what they were buying. It would make Stonehold forever dangerous as the effects of the hex seeped through time. The Duchy would be beaten repeatedly, at random intervals, as if by a blind giant wielding a maul. The devastation would be indiscriminate and unprecedented. Regardless of misgivings, her duty to the Sisterhood was to advise, not control. The Eighth House did not engage in politics.