The Last Page (99 page)

Maybe.

In truth she had no idea why it was here or what the book meant to it.

The incomprehensible smell of the thing washed over her. So sweet.
Like rose flesh. Like a flower she had never smelled before. It was cloying. Overpowering.

Maybe her proof, her bolt aimed at Megan, had drawn it. After all, it was the first time she had taken numbers from the
C
srym T
and turned them into holomorphic force. Again, it was just a guess. Her legs felt weak. Her body modulated, softening as if subject to wavelengths emanating from its core. She had the unpleasant memory of Megan’s hex at Deep Cloister and felt like she might wobble apart, muscles waggling free of her bones.

Is this an attack? Or am I simply too close?
Like trying to swallow a strandy web of phlegm at the back of her throat, Sena had to concentrate on simple systems. She couldn’t walk; it felt like she was standing in pudding. Her thoughts slowed.

Maybe the head of the C
l’cr’Nok, hanging in the great hall, had drawn it.
But would something so powerful and different from its physical cousin hold a grudge? Would it even care about murder?

Sena didn’t know. She had no answers as she stood, trapped, feeling its cold, unseen secretions envelop her like gelatin.

There was a potion in her belt.
Hemofurtum,
she thought dully and reached for it with exaggerated sluggishness. She had kept it close in anticipation of the formula that would help Caliph win. She had been planning to perform it . . . right now . . . or earlier. She couldn’t remember. Why hadn’t she done it earlier? Instead of wandering aimlessly through the castle halls?

She didn’t know.

She pried the potion’s cap off like a clumsy drunk and watched the crimson fluid purl upward in the air.
That shouldn’t be happening,
she thought dreamily.

A shadow, like a brushstroke, had appeared beside her. It hung just above the left side of the battlement in her peripheral sight, smoky and gaunt and curled. Black, with a vague wisp of white hair and within it, a hint of cimmerian eyes, burning through the cold, staring across the empty gulf between the tourelle and the thing that boiled on the wall.

“Nathan?” she asked. But the specter only watched. Sena felt like laughing, everything was so bizarre. She opened her mouth to speak, trying to gather holojoules from the weightless potion. Panic. She couldn’t breathe. The heavy invisible slime poured into her mouth. Into her nose and throat. She couldn’t speak. She struggled. She thought she heard an old man humming far away.

Sena twisted as her feet came loose from the stone. She flailed. Floating. Fighting for her life. She couldn’t hold her breath any longer, she began to
choke. As the jellied air poured in, deep inside her throat, she felt something bite.

On the side of the castle, the godling-stain bubbled, a black honeycomb of flesh pouring from its hole, plasmoid, tentacular, hideously fast, a complex mollusk unfolding.

The black pseudopodia foamed toward her, silent as thrown ink, glistening with deep cribriform patterns. There was a burst of prurient pink, an outward thrust of bright color trimming those impossible lobes. The pseudopodia didn’t move in concert. They were not like the anemones from Desdae’s biology labs or any other creature with a cognizant grasp. The outpouring flesh, if it was flesh, moved like an abruption . . . like something that had exploded from a wound. Mentally, Sena screamed.

The blood potion floated in front of her like the glowing tube at Grouselich Hospital, the disgorged red contents hovered, roiled, and remained suspended. Her eyes glazed, her throat relaxed, the slime-thick air poured into her lungs. Something bit deeper, like serrated teeth, slicing into the soft tissue of her pharynx, biting, slicing, she could taste her own blood.

Those ebbing holojoules . . . waiting for her voice. She thought of Megan’s transumption hex, of the Devourer: Gr
-ner Shie.

In the distance, the sound of thunder or zeppelin guns tortured the sky. Sena’s body convulsed from lack of oxygen . . . the black flesh was all around her. And she was floating, stuttering. Catapult. Zoetrope.
Where was Caliph?
The Thae’gn’s sweet mucus filled her sinuses with incomprehensible alien dreaming, scent-shadows of her own death. The curl of smoke that was shaped like an old man did nothing.

Snow fell.
Odd.
It seemed unaffected by the thick air. Her vision was blurring. Then suddenly, she was assaulted from every direction, both internally as well as all across her skin. Her jacket tore away in parallel strips. Her clothing disintegrated. She could suddenly breathe but the pain was exquisite. Black tendrils sliced gill-like slits into her skin. Those arms that looked so slippery, surprisingly powerful . . . and rough. Like coarse sandpaper grit. They snagged and tore at reality. She could see them shredding the fiber of space with every subtle movement that they made, reality turning to mist, threadbare wisps that dispersed slightly, revealing glimpses of someplace else . . . someplace hidden . . . hovering just behind. Space closed as the arms moved, re-weaving, healing, but vaguely warped . . . vaguely scarred.

She was breathing through her skin . . . or maybe she had stopped breathing altogether. Her body had been filleted, every part of her exposed,
like a child’s snowflake cut from paper. She hung in tatters in the air, bones and organs twisting. A gory paper doll.

Black filaments of something like mist condensed, forming webs below her dangling guts. They braided, wound up, tugged gently at her tattered flesh. She felt the manipulation, not from without, but from within, at a cellular level, a molecular level.

Her smallest parts, the fibers of her tissue, the atoms themselves were grinding against each other, turning, realigning, tuning themselves to some new atomic pole. They snapped suddenly, locking together, fundamentally changed, perfectly attuned to this new orientation.

And Sena was back together, packed tight and sutured shut and the great black mass trimmed with vaginal pink was collapsing, withdrawing, once again becoming a void, an empty hole on the castle wall.

Sena dropped, no longer floating. The potion of blood now spun, falling as it should have done minutes ago. She had been struggling so hard to scream that now the sound ripped from her throat, filled with numbers.

“Not that one,” the curl of smoke whispered. It had not moved from its position during the entire ordeal, while the godling-stain had chined and sliced and then reinvented her anew. “Use the beacon.” It was a command not spoken in Hinter or Trade. Sena had no clear sense of individual words, only the collective meaning.

Without thinking or questioning, she obeyed. Words gushed from her mouth, a torrent of repellent sounds. Was she imagining it, or could she actually hear a ghostly stopwatch drumming through its tiny gears.

Faster!

The old thin voice sequenced like a horologe, just outside the hurricane of her concentration.

Her flesh prickled.

Faster!

Sena let the Inti’Drou glyphs sink their blackened compound forms into her eyes. She could see them even shut, behind her eyelids, played like picture lanterns across her brain. She was preparing to inject portions of their compressed multidimensional data into her argument.

Sena nearly choked on the glottal sounds that tumbled up her throat. Lightning rived the towers of Isca Castle. Snow fell. Thunder boomed as if the compression crack of the Pplarian guns had finally reached the parapets half an hour late.

She gathered the holojoules from the whirling blood before it splattered across the floor.

To focus Megan’s transumption hex, she called out, sending up a beacon
from the tourelle, screaming at Gr
-ner Shie to
see
her. Forgotten were her plans of helping Caliph. She was obeying the whisper in her head.

The beacon went up, a meaningless pillar of math that bent every dimension, useless except in pinpointing her location to the thing that had been roused for the sole purpose of devouring Stonehold.

“You will save the Duchy,” the trace of smoke assured her, sibilant and dry like a leaf-rattle in the wind.

Glassy shapes spread suddenly from the direction of the zeppelin war. Delitescent palpi puffed the sky from the other side of nothing, fungal forms swelling. The stratosphere burst like fluted glass gone wild. Sena saw jelly slipping through crystal pearls, glistening worms the color of empty air.

Colors played across her face.
So beautiful! Incandescent pink. Flaming, cerulean blue.

There was no doubt that the thing that had eaten Fallow Down had found her! This time it was not a random abrogation of luck. It was cognizant as it groped its legion parts in the direction of her voice.