The Last Page

Sena thanked him unceremoniously and gave him the extra silver she knew he wanted.

As he pulled his shirt back over his head he said, “You be all right . . . up here alone? Nuthin down there fer me but a sleepin’ mule.”

Sena flinched at the suggestion.

“I’ll be fine.”

Although he soared over her in his baggy clay-stained overalls and huge mud-clumped boots, the sexton recoiled. Maybe he found her smile unpleasant.

He bent down sheepishly to retrieve his lantern and the other half of the spade. Then he turned into the trees, following the statues out, raising a giant hand in parting.

Quickly, Sena lowered herself into the hole and with her sickle knife sliced a lock from the corpse’s head. She walked back to the mausoleum with lengthened, willful strides.

On the mausoleum floor she scratched with charcoal, stepping on one end of the string and pivoting, winding the charcoal at the other end to get a perfect circle. She covered the faint line with powdered chalk, making sure the ring remained unbroken.

Swiftly now, her fingers scribbled symbols all around. Going for new charcoal when hers broke or wore down to an unavailing stub.

Her breathing grew rapid with the haste of her work. She lit the candles with a box of matches she had purchased on the street.

One blew out.

She pricked her finger and with a terse holomorphic word ignited it again.

Into a bowl went the dark contents of the silver vial along with the lock of hair and several fibrous roots and furry leaves. The pestle ground everything into a repulsive bituminous mush. She touched the stringy paste to her tongue and felt the muscles in her jaw tighten.

She set her teeth and closed her eyes and slit her arm just above the wrist. She let her part of the bizarre recipe drain into the bowl before adding a smidge of water. The paste thinned.

A few drops she dribbled into the book’s grisly lock.

Sena stopped to bind her arm and double-check the directions in her journal.

Like a child dreading medicine, she raised the horrific brew. Half a teaspoonful she tried to drink but had to chew. The hairs clung in the back of her throat. She gagged, fought for control, and set the bowl on the ground.

I’m not going to puke. I’m not going to puke. She clutched her stomach. She battled to reign in the rebellion going on behind her teeth.

Finally she won. Her tongue traveled, searching for the remaining threads of hair, which (prescribed by the recipe or not) she fished out with her middle finger.

Petulant from the ordeal, she swirled the rest of the bowl’s thickening contents until it broke over the lip and splashed the powdered ring.

Lastly, she deposited the Csrym T.

Sena stood back, holding her wrist gingerly, looking at the flickering sight before her. All the ridiculous trappings of superstition . . . but she had done it as prescribed. One way or another, this was the end of a journey, the end of an affair.

Soon, her eyes would be opened to the mysteries of the world, the final blocks in raising her fortress of truth, or not.

Sena composed her thoughts and tried to breathe normally. She closed her eyes until the words that were also numbers came like familiar friends into her mind.

For half a minute, the abhorrent modulating delicacy of the Unknown Tongue filled the crypt’s withered air.

When she finished, Sena’s eyes opened to the stirring of wind. The silent howl of the ancient book, her constant torture for the past eight months, ceased suddenly, lulled by the words into dreadful slumber.

A clicking noise rose. All the candles save the one in her box sent long streamers of smoke from their glowing wicks.

The book shuddered, the latch popped and the heavy crimson hide thumped itself open.

A frenzy of crackling pages tried to take flight from the spine, rising in a fan of rage. For a moment, Sena imagined an old man’s whisper as the pages shivered. Then a few leaves blew in from outside and Sena’s head spun at a distant sound.

Was the night air thrashing the trees so fiercely? She could hear her own breathing. Maybe the sexton was playing a trick. Or had that long, high-pitched, inhuman cry been real? A gorgonian scream out in the hills, echoing off the unseen moons?

CHAPTER 31

Under the estate’s mercurial shadows, Sena perched like a lovely daenid reading the Csrym T.

Its pages burst with tumid legends distended out of Sth, rendering minute archaistic details about a place called Jôrgill Deep before it had vanished from a highly theoretical, primordial world.

The stories trembled on baby-soft sheets of vellum, sounding in her head with unsettling naïveté. They spoke of happy times before Davishok and the Rain of Fire—when black pimplota flowered and dulcet laughter echoed through rampant arches and olden citadels burnished by the sea.

But every page she turned whispered of deceit. Every passing sentence conjured menaces and shadow, dusty races known now to be extinct: Gringlings, Ublisi and Syule.

As Sena read, her eyes filled with vague Yllo’tharnic undulations as great shadows moving under blue. Liquid planets refracted over primeval creatures that hauled themselves beneath the waves in massive pods whose numbers reckoned in the millions.

The Csrym T spoke in myth better than a merchant talked money.

Melancholy verse disgorged images of darkling yellow clouds, winds that howled with voices from the stars. With the turn of a page she leapt to cantos concerning times when tendrils black as plasmic crude rose from seas that were not seas—when mountains shifted at the desert’s edge.

The genealogy of nightmares lay before her. Doomed unspeakable names with magic numbers flecked each page. Nested in old thorny strokes of ink, Sena found Gr-ner Shie: the Faceless One, sleeping while Urebus crawled through his city buried in the Ncrpa.

When at last she lifted her eyes from the page, she felt dazed. The western sky lurked blue and lightless. One hundred eighty degrees from oncoming night, the sinking sun flared from the east and set fire to the western oaks. Their leaves made a bright patchwork of metallic orange against the horizon.

The Csrym T’s howl had dwindled to a gentle whimper like an infant with the croup.

Since the night of the storm, Sena had taken copious notes on the book’s formidable contents. She struggled to draw an outline in her head.

The first section consisted of a preface that had been stitched inside the cover seemingly as an afterthought. Roughly one hundred fifty pages long and written in Dark Tongue, it was from these preface myths that Sena had been struggling to read.

Dark Tongue was a knotty language to decipher, dead as it had been for thousands of years. Like all language it faded inside the parentheses of disuse. Suddenly faced with her lack of practice, Sena now found her mental dictionary maddeningly hard to evoke.

Tired and frustrated, she scanned ahead, gazing in wonder at page after page of Inti’Drou glyphs.

Roughly eight hundred pages of absolute power endowed the heavy tome with a thickness that paralleled her arm.

The glyphs looped on themselves distractingly, formed polysyllables Sena could never hope to pronounce. Insanely abstruse and sometimes displayed with up to five others on the same page, each glyph comprised an unsettling design amalgamated from vague primordial shapes.