The Last Page (42 page)

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
C
srym 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
C
srym 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
C
srym 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 J
yn Hêl.
¹⁸
The 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.

Giganalee trudged across the room and sat in her throne like a dead thing, claws clutching velvet armrests, head balanced like a skull, trying to see into Sena’s future.

Hours passed. The Eighth House did not sleep while she dreamt of red skies and death. She could not catch the shapes, could not pause them in their flight. They soared like scarlet clouds across the murrey pitch, recreant shapes wheeling to turn south; they tried to get away. They were hideous and malevolent as they scooted before the weather, fleeing something far more ominous.

All at once, Giganalee’s eyes opened.

The sallow, oily light of dawn slipped through the windows, shearing off around the shape of a bird.

Giganalee dragged a broken tooth across the back of her hand, tearing skin like tissue. She muttered in the Unknown Tongue as her blood broke through the fragile, liver-spotted flesh.

The pigeon came to her, charmed.

It was ugly and in poor health, ragged from mountain winds and weather. It had not been as fast as the Pandragonian albatross that had delivered word of Mr. Amphungt
l’s failed negotiations.

Giganalee clutched it and carried it to her workbench like a piece of wood. She laid it on its belly, forcing the legs down. With her other hand she pulled a jeweler’s screwdriver from a rack of delicate tools.

Using the flat edge she pried the cruestone from the socket in its skull and dropped it into a bottle on the nearby shelf. Then she flipped the bird over on its back and, with a pair of tweezers, pulled the coiled message like a clock spring from its housing.

Her eyes were old and cloudy. Her collection of ornate magnifying glasses lay scattered throughout the room. She shoved the bird into an enormous cage and locked the door.

When she found a lens, she studied Miriam’s note under the ochre window light, reading the miniscule Withil with ease. Then she stuffed the paper into her mouth and chewed it to paste, swallowing it like a lump of phlegm. She laid her glass on a small stand near her chair and frowned.

Miriam had done right. She was brave. Brave enough to be Coven Mother someday. Yet Giganalee faltered in her thoughts. After all, it was too much to believe.