The Last Page

The Csrym T was organized so that an entire chapter could usually be viewed with the book lying flat open. Chapters were marked by a curious symbol that formed a break at the beginning and end of each section. There were seldom more than twelve glyphs to a chapter though Sena noticed a few instances of ten, eight and six. On some occasions, five and one glyph comprised entire chapters by themselves.

The authors of the book must not have been concerned about wasting space. In the instances where a solitary glyph embodied one complete chapter that glyph alone was given the room of two entire pages.

To stare at one glyph caused her immediate eye strain while the result of twelve in throbbing black panorama brought the sense of hemorrhage into Sena’s head.

Lesser text accompanied each mark in pulsing thorny strokes, penned in the shadow of the main symbol. This lesser text, like the preface, was written in an abrogate version of Dark Tongue, as bewilderingly sophisticated as it was hopelessly obsolete.

Sena could pick out certain words but she would need other books to decipher the majority of it.

For now, she presumed more than her understanding factually allowed, that the lesser text named and described the power of the Inti’Drou glyph it accompanied and gave directions for a reader’s point of attack—the place where study of the glyph ought to begin.

At the end of the lesser text sat one final symbol, the purpose of which Sena could not derive.

Sena straightened and decided to let the book fall open. Perhaps the habit of some chronic scholar would make one page in particular conspicuous above the rest.

She stood the Csrym T perfectly vertical on its spine and pressed the covers tightly together.

Dramaturgically, she let go.

Infinitesimal moments passed.

Sena watched.

The pages seemed to breathe. They puffed with air, began to fan, forcing the covers apart. A dominant crack appeared in the solid block of vellum, like a fissure forming in a brick. The covers fell. The book toppled.

Page 379.

All around the glyph, in wide-framed margins, there were notations, cramped and written in a crisp endemic hand. The writer had penned them in Old Speech to baffle unschooled eyes.

Sena had no trouble understanding them and devoured them at once. With unreasonable shock she realized Caliph’s uncle had been their author. He even signed them occasionally, like journal entries:

—Nathan H. 543 Y.o.T. Crow.

She found endless cross-references in the notes. Little trails of insight that wound back and forth like the random chewing of a worm. Nearly one-third of the pages had been marked up with Nathaniel’s distinctive hand.

His years of arduous study provided Sena with an extraordinary head start. As she read, she made her own notes in the journal from her pack:

i  The inked portion of each glyph is no more important than the un-inked portion of each glyph. The Gringlings devised a system of compressing information so that each glyph is a double glyph, once in black ink and once in the empty “background ink” of the page.

ii The eyes must be trained to read both the black ink and the “white ink” at the same time.

iii Every curve, angle and line has meaning. Each glyph is a spatial map and the width of strokes reveal numbers and ratios upon being measured. When the glyph is stared at and the mind is drifting, the glyph will seem to move. Extra dimensional (or nonphysical numbers) are evinced when the glyph begins to read the reader and the eyes remained fixed in trance.

iv Mortal vocals, according to the previous owner, are typically incapable of verbalizing the Inti’Drou markings.

v Every glyph contains hundreds of objects and subjects and verbs that correlate back and forth not only within a specific glyph but in relation to the others of any given chapter. Each glyph must be studied in detail. Once that glyph is fully understood, the next may be attempted and so on until the entire chapter has been read. Then the chapter must be studied as a whole, finding the meaning in the spaces between and the correlations behind and between every glyph to every other glyph.

vi It is obvious from Nathan’s notes that he believed any single glyph subsumed a relative holomorphic gradation of power which he states is “. . . on scale with the creation or destruction of worlds.”

Sena set her notes aside.

Now, instead of constant howling, she felt nauseous. She realized that the glyphs in the Csrym T were so complex that singular structures of thought might take days or weeks to understand. They formed impossible pictures and indescribable movements behind her eyes. The solid surging marks, she didn’t doubt, might cause blindness.

Sena looked, captured a glyph and closed her eyes to study it.

There’s enough here to study three Hjolk-trull lifetimes, maybe more. She felt like a child reading for the first time, sounding it out in her head (since her vocals were of little use), trying to understand the academese of gods.

She had barely scratched the surface and already there were mysterious threads to follow, like one curious passage in the preface myths that spoke of the Last Page and that seemed to coincide with the rubbings she had taken from the Halls below Sandren.

She couldn’t make anything of it:

“And the Last Page will be written before Quietus comes.”

Sena felt momentarily silly as she stared at the words with profound reverence. Literal believers in even the most ensconced religions were fading.

According to the Herald, the congregation at Hullmallow Cathedral had dwindled; not because the organ’s freakish stack of organic pipes (that twisted and splayed across the walls and ceiling like variegated trachea) had frightened them away.

Rather, the newest religion in the north was a revival of monotheism: the worship of self. There was no guarantee of purchasing friends or love or fame or happiness but hawkers sold facsimiles at a fairly going clip. As a result in the city, varietal masturbation sold far, far better than sex.

She folded her notes and closed the Csrym T, putting the great block of vellum in her pack. She dropped from the low oak in which she had been sitting. As she paced Nathaniel’s yard, fallen leaves made chewing sounds beneath her feet.

Worry consumed her.

Now she understood the trap that Nathaniel Howl had written about in the margins, the one he claimed to have chuckled ruefully over when he discovered it decades ago. And now, she guessed, it had claimed another victim who was just as inattentive to the antithetical drollery of whatever cosmic powers had created the lock.

Quite simply, there was no way to open the Csrym T’s lock without succumbing to its curse.

It was a simple conditional, like those learned in logic philosophy at Desdae when students were faced with categorical syllogisms and the prospect of memorizing the square of opposition: if true love cannot be betrayed then betrayed love cannot be true.

Sena’s hunt for the required ingredients had been a hunt for a beast that never breathed.

The trap’s simplicity was also its genius.

Only a truly impassive heart would not revolt at the cost of opening the book. Only a power-hungry zealot could accept the fulsome ritual as a tolerable exchange. And only those deserving a cryptic fate would not see the blatant incongruity demanded by the recipe.