The Last Page (92 page)

And the glyphs are whole, on one page, captured in a glance. No chapters to sort through. No metaphors or diagrams or grammar used at all. The initial confusion she faced between hundreds of subjects and objects has gelled, cleared. With her new eyes she sees the raw ethereal information contained in particles of light. In ink. All of it together. Together. Precise.

Words in Hinter, words in Trade, haunt her through the night. Torture her with their constraints. She dreams of definitions that do not fit.

But there are some words, strange, cooling words, like moon sweat,
that dapple her pia mater during sleep, running molten cold through her sulci, soaking deep into her brain. They sound smooth
. . .

Sslî
. Ooil-Üauth.
hloht.

They are giving her direction. They are telling her what to do. And despite her desire to help Caliph she finds herself instead looking out across the world, perhaps because the facets of her eyes derive from cuts meant for hunting. But she has modified the angles, used the
C
srym T
to adjust the purpose of her eyes. It is safe to say that no one in the Sisterhood has eyes like Sienae Iilool.

In the autumn chill, she sits at night, facing south, staring through her bedroom wall. She looks from her vanity through Bl
kton, South Fell and Maruchine, through phantasmagoric drainpipes in the substructure of Ghoul Court.

She sees the slaughter of the muck spies, the venting of blood into cavernous byways. The Lua’gr
c are cleaning up. The flawless are moving. The huge maggot bodies she associates with the attack on her cottage are abandoning Isca’s drains.

Yrisl will be the only muck left, protected by the castle and his loyalty to Caliph Howl.

The Lua’gr
c are not angry with him though they would kill him if they could. Yrisl does not answer the dispatches they have sent him.

But the Lua’gr
c are removed from human emotion. They would kill him out of utility rather than rage.

The city watch now recognizes the Lua’gr
c half-breed spies. The mucks are of no further use. So they are eaten, bones and all, rich nutrients ingested, the blubber and talons of the cannibals fortified preparatory to the journey ahead.

Only the flawless survive.

But they are not a vengeful race. For them, carnage is holomorphy, tactics and something close to joy or delight. They have no rituals for their dead, no tombs or graveyards. The dead are eaten without thought as a matter of course.

Sena watches through the wall, and begins to understand them as the flawless grow fat and sink from Ghoul Court into deep reservoirs and cold abyssal bourns that gush or leak south below the world crust. She begins to understand them as ancient organisms that follow routes like salmon where the water has not seen sun for many thousand years.

The Lua’gr
c abandon Old Duny’s brumal backwash, migrating south into less frostbitten waters. Sena sees them course through tunnels across the convoluted miles. Under the continent’s blind-making shadow, their journey will take several months to complete. But Sena has read about
them, knows that eventually they will find their way by touch or sense of smell or some more primitive perception no human ecologist has ever catalogued or named.

In the end, the legendary Seas of Y
loch will welcome them home; they will pour their bodies in, mingling with slurry spilt from culverts older than the Duchy of Stonehold. They will drizzle out of sewer systems designed by the slaver race before the advent of the hexapala’s eight thousandth year. And for a while they will be at home in olden structures built up in the deep, waiting for word to come from
lung where the last of the true Lua’gr
c, the last of the true flawless dwell.