The Last Page Read online

  CHAPTER 5

  Tynan doesn’t come to her graduation. He has never seen her time at Desdae as important.

  Commencement goes off, bitter, solitary and anticlimactic, concluding with rain.

  It doesn’t matter, she tells herself. I did this for me. But she feels desolate. Fuck Tynan Brakest. Fuck Caliph Howl too for not showing up.

  Then they arrive.

  Women in rain-dark storm cloaks looking bizarre, so pragmatically dressed amid the throng of suit coats and corsets. As parasols pop open and people bustle into Desdae Hall, the three women move against the current, directly toward her.

  Sena’s heart stammers as though she is losing her balance on a ledge. She considers running but then, paradoxically heroic and at the same time alarming, Darsey Eaton swoops in.

  The undisputed master of his domain, Chancellor Eaton faces the three women uncowed and unaware of his peril. Sena finds a touch of comedy in watching him bring them up short. He towers, pear-shaped, leaning forward, hands behind his back, the welcoming smile on his face in perfect counterpoint to the deep-set eyes that wield disdain like a pair of clubs. Sena sees it in third person: the whole uncomfortable little crowd grazing the lip of satire, smiling thinly over introductions and regarding one another with cordial skepticism.

  Shucking fear, Sena makes her way to Darsey’s side and joins the conversation. She can tell that the chancellor doesn’t believe any of it: neither that Megan is her grandmother nor that the other two are her cousins. He offers to escort all of them to Desdae Hall where refreshments are already being served.

  Megan returns his invitation with procuress-arrogance. “Thank you but we’ll be along. No need to wait.”

  Sena watches the cords in Darsey’s neck stretch; he smiles and glances sideways into her face. It happens so quickly that Sena barely has time to understand he is checking with her, making certain everything is fine. It shocks her to realize that, in a cool and businesslike way, he is genuinely concerned.

  When Sena nods faintly he immediately looks elsewhere, scanning the lawn, overseeing the mass of people. Then the chancellor bows, rainwater dribbling from his hat, turns squarely and abandons her, striding purposefully toward the bright open doors of the cultural hall.

  “So good to see you, Sienae,” Megan chirps after he is gone. Sena listens for irony but detects none. She still wonders if she is in trouble. The Shrdnae Mother never ventures outside of Miryhr and her presence at Desdae is bizarre. The ancillas seem tense. They stare at Sena, all business. Maybe they know about Caliph . . . or Tynan. But Darsey is gone. There is no one on the lawn anymore and they would have taken her by now, in the Shrdnae grip, hauling her off to a fiery end.

  Sena watches Megan dig inside a gloomy paisley corduroy bag for her hand mirror. “The only femininity I have left is melting.” She powders her cheeks and pulls her cowl forward. “Let’s get out of the rain.”

  “My things . . .”

  “Pshh—” Megan’s finger taps her temple. “Anything you need should already be up here. We don’t have time to dawdle.”

  Sena subdues her glare. “Yes, Mother.”

  “Don’t be crabby with me. It’s bad enough you wasted eight years of your own life in this trash heap of positivist thinkers. You won’t be wasting what little time I have left. We’ll get you all new things in Skellum. Come along.”

  Sena is whisked away clutching only her gown and her diploma. She goes back to the familiar shadowed buildings that released her nine years ago as an adolescent spy, to the socket vaults of old parliament made strange by Shrdnae Witchocracy.

  As Megan’s she-sn,4 Sena retains access to Deep Cloister and the archives. But the privilege costs her. She must work for the Sisterhood.

  Summer begins with warm arguments between Sena and Megan. As usual, Sena gets her way. She is assigned to Sandren and leaves parliament behind, supported by authentic government papers identifying her with a list of verfiable lies. In an attaché, she carries an array of pad-paradschas rationed from the Sisterhood’s vaults. When she reaches the city state, she liquidates them at the most affluent jewelry shop she can find. It is enough to live well for a year and it gets her a footing in local circles without turning her into a celebrity. She begins donating to Emolus, the most popular church in town, and thereby makes Bishop Wilhelm’s acquaintance. He is a man on everyone’s guest list and seizes each opportunity to take her to parties where he introduces her to Sandren’s powerful elite.

  At Megan’s request, Sena sleeps with three of them, diplomats out of Iycestoke and Pandragor. It is easy work. They are reasonably attractive, clean shaven and rich enough to make it seem more like a first date than what it really is.

  The information she collects goes to a half-sister named Clea who runs a potion shop near Litten Street.

  It is tiring. Compartmentalizing Clea from Tynan, Tynan from Wilhelm from the diplomats she has fucked. There is an embarrassing moment at a fund-raiser when Tynan’s father sees her. She knows instantly that despite her best efforts, rumors have reached him. Sandren’s influential circles are small and Tynan’s father is in all of them. He crosses the room calmly and whispers three sentences into her ear. “You look lovely tonight. Amazing what jewelry can do. Stay away from my son.”

  Tynan never mentions the incident. He remains loyal, funding her cottage off the books.

  A graduation present.

  As the cottage begins to form, blueprints to foundation to framework, Sena realizes it is more than a building. Not only is it a delightful way to exact her pound of flesh from Tynan’s father, but it is also her first real stab at independence—sort of. It is definitely her first act of outright defiance against the Sisterhood.

  She is supposed to stay in Sandren, seduce men and gather information. That’s what the Sisterhood is paying her for. But she builds her cottage in the countryside, well away from the city state.

  A gleaming padparadscha comes in a nondescript envelope every month to her box on Goorin Street. The stipend allows for plenty of luxuries when combined with Tynan’s allowance. She meets him on weekends, risking death out of spite.

  For those that marry in the name of the Witchocracy, Sena suspects the lines sometimes blur, but for field agents such as her, pårn5— the duty—is rigorously enforced.

  When Tynan and she stay at Sandren’s posh hotels she tries to revel in it, but anger leaves her empty. For a while, at college, sex had very nearly slipped from being a political tool to a pastime. Now, with Megan’s influence enveloping her again, all of that is gone.

  She is back. Deeper than ever. An Ascendant of the Seventh House. Apart from that there is the undeniable sense of family she attaches to the organization. She buries it. She ridicules it internally as an affectation but the feelings persist, a vague sense of belonging. Unable to verbalize such a grotesquery, Sena sums it as crassly as she can in her journal, “They still have a use.”

  She moves out of Sandren even before her cottage is complete and begins skipping social functions, fading from Sandrenese galas, shrugging her duties to focus on her project. Megan’s letters become persistent. The cottage secret slips.

  “The Highlands of Tue? Within eyeshot of the Porch of Sth? Are you mad?”

  Sena doesn’t argue. Megan is right.

  She still remembers her first journey below the Walls of Tue, looking up at the grim dark circle perched on the brink of cliff and sky; she had seen something in the air, transparent ommatophorous images, like light trapped in ancient glass.

  Sena won’t admit that the monument frightens her. In the end, it doesn’t matter. Her goal, her search, wins out. The Stones are linked to something abstruse and awful, something that can protect her if she actually finds the Csrym T.

  Much different than the modernists in Sandren, Sena sees herself as a believer in sweet black secrets, rich as chocolate cake, visceral and bloody with cosmic truths learned and lost on the tides of other civilizations. In the cities, in the gleaming dirty bustle
and rush, Sena thinks, we are on the edge of something . . . not the future. Something so old it only feels new . . .

  Sena keeps working for the Sisterhood even after her cottage is finished. She fudges on her hours. And then, after nearly two years, everything pays off.

  “New electroplate angel on my altarpiece,” Bishop Wilhelm murmurs. Sena says nothing as they pass a pharmacopolist. “God-jarring marvel pales in comparison to you.”

  The bishop is smoldering. He swings himself around her like a censer. Cologne and wealth pour off him like smoke.

  Lines of sight intersticed by momentary objects and rushing people allow others to glimpse their eastward passage along the Avenue of Lights. They catch snippets of Sena. The fleeting blond tantrum in the wind. The gem-blue eyes italicized in mascara. The movement of her hips caroms sunlight, sets the black jewel fastened in her navel flashing. It is a chronotropic spell. Some of her gawkers collide with city things, remembering their places in the street on impact.

  Sena slices east between the buildings with purpose.

  At the outlet to Rum Street she and the bishop say good-bye. His questionable eloquence fades into city sound as she pays for teagle fare and enters one of the gondolas blackened by a century of weather. In her hand is a colorful shopping bag, stretched by something heavy . . .

  It hadn’t been found in some forsaken temple or ruined attic. Rather it was to be had off March Street for five gold scythes.

  “I want this one,” she had said, holding up the book.

  The proprietor had smiled with lips like wood shavings—pale, smooth and tight.

  “That’s from Stonehold . . . very old. Can’t open it though. Latch’s rusted shut, see?”

  “How much do you want?” Sena had given him a coy look, then turned away, pretending to consider while his thin fingers had kept caressing the leather.

  “The binding suggests it might have come from the islands before I found it.”

  “I’ll give you three gold scythes.”

  A simper.

  “Five?”

  The machine lurches down a wind-scraped cliff, carrying Sena with it, scudding through iron rib cages draped in grease. She watches the operator throw his switches and apply the brakes whenever they descend too fast. His eyes are furtive and lochetic. As soon as the great old lift clanks against its coupling in the ghettos of Seatk’r, Sena leaves.

  Her animal is stabled nearby. It takes her out of the reeking enclave, pounding east and home along the lip of the plateau.

  Delusions of robbery and loss stem her excitement. It is the fastest, most panicked ride she has ever made from Sandren.

  When she finally arrives, she crosses the threshold of her cottage and locks the door, touching a chemiostatic lamp and flooding the kitchen with shadows more than light. When she slides her new possession out onto the table, the room sways around it. Reality seems to buckle. Her fingers twist her hair into ringlets while the object groans. There is no actual sound. But she can hear it, feel it, blasting her tabletop with psychomantic darkness.

  She moves to wind a thermal crank in the corner. Yellow dials wobble to life as the metal snaps, expands and infuses the room with warmth incapable of dispelling the chill she feels pouring from the book.

  For a while she frets, examines the metal ferrules riveted at the corners, beaten to resemble coiled Nerytian serpents whose bodies have worn smooth under centuries of handling. There are greenish pits where air works the metal. Like bariothermic coils, strange power sources in the south, the cover shocks her fingertips with cool. It does not have a title but a faint rune on the front reassures her that this is the object, the unbelievable end of her search.

  Its ornate lock peers at her from where the tumblers nest like the rusted legs of a metal spider, crawled inside and curled up to sleep. Her rakes and picks are useless. Cutting the spine, sawing bits off, all would be equally futile and dangerous.

  Her eyes trace its shape in the middle of the table. Awful, like a murdered child. She can only stare and think about the recipe.

  On the twenty-third of Myhr her letter to Caliph remained unanswered. Light dribbled through the trees, pattered around the leaves from last fall. Sena sat at her kitchen table looking out the window. Her head was killing her. She got up, uncorked a honey-colored bottle and tapped the glass against her palm. Four aspirin rolled out. She drank them with milk, flipped out her pocket watch.

  Eight sixty-four. Sixteen minutes ’til noon. A soft tapping echoed through the house.

  Tynan? Three more taps.

  She noticed a shadow fall across the curtains near the front door. Even through the gently tossing lace, the sound of mercurial breathing prickled over her skin like vinegar. Not breathing. It was mechanical, ill-regulated, gasping, then whispering, then whining like the draft beneath a door.

  She moved around the back of the table carefully.

  The shadow was massive and bent, like a huge cowl vent on a ship’s deck. The thing’s breathing fluttered strangely, disloyal to its origins. The sound bounced off glass, floor, coming from behind her, wet and unpredictable, like wind through a storm drain.

  Sena jumped catlike to the top of her table with only a whisper of sound. She could look out at a better angle from here, bracing one hand against the ceiling, leaning out into the room, craning to see around the edge of the window.

  The filthy shape of the visitor eluded her, wavering in and out of view. A mountain of rags. When it swung left she could see the tatters hanging from its bulk, heavy, barely swinging in the breeze, like dripping bandages. No visible feet. Its carcass was wrapped every inch in the sopping swaddling. How can it move? The rags poured down and pooled where torso met ground in an oozing pile the same consistency as wet cigar ash. The upper yards of fabric stretched taut across the creature’s hump, a great pile of muscle it seemed, where the body made its ninety degree turn like an elbow joint, undiminished in size or thickness, defying its own center of gravity.

  Finally an appendage, impossibly thin, like pencils taped together end to end, articulated from a small lump of gray meat. It swung from a powerful rack of bone that must have connected somewhere beneath the rags to that enormous hump. Sena watched as the limb uncurled. There were nails, almost talons, eight inches long, uncurling like digits. One of them extended, the middle one, a stiletto poised. It drew back with dramatic acuity then struck forward against the door, tapping again with soft, almost human decorum.

  She could see the shadow of the fingernail on her curtain. It was banded as though parts of it were translucent and parts of it were opaque, like a tropical fish spine, she thought, painted in bands of white and brown. Its staccato movement against her door stopped. The limb withdrew under the haystack of rags.

  Sena had seen enough. She walked down her table like she would have walked down a staircase, stepping from table to chair seat, chair seat to floor. She was headed for the back door when Ns brayed like a snake. The cat was off the wall, through the back door and gone in a flash.

  Sena gasped as the coldness passed through her. It did not hurt immediately but when she looked down she saw the slash on her bare waist. Like a slice through her finger in the kitchen; she didn’t want to look.

  Instinctively she mashed her hand over her side. A warm tingling wash of red was gushing down her thigh.

  Time slowed.

  She noticed the long fingernail hovering above her wound, the rags swinging behind her like drapery. The huge presence was with her in the kitchen but the front door had not opened.

  Where was the sound?

  A fecal smell like tooth decay filled the room. She felt herself topple, fall toward the back doorway, clutch at the stones. She could see points of light now, oozing out of darkness. Sidreal. Slippery. Galaxies dripping dizzy. The bent torso of the rag-thing above her was fuzzy. Everything was fuzzy. A hand like a branch drooled cosmic cold.

  She tried to talk but either she couldn’t hear or her lungs weren’t moving air. Tingling nu
mbness was coursing through her sex, down into her legs, spreading from the wound. She couldn’t feel her ass. Her arms refused to work properly. She flailed.

  Her numb body was sliding across flagstones now, out of the house. One of her fingernails caught on something and tore, a fibrous shredding that ripped it to the quick. But there was no pain. Her body was moving backward now. Back into the house. She was being fought over. Her torso hit the door frame with a limp solid sound.

  Sena felt broken inside, like ceramic dishes dashed against the floor. She tried to steady herself and realized she could move her arm. Her finger slipped into the cut on her waist, brushed the hot slick pulse of her own entrails. She heard herself cry. Sound was coming back but there was nothing she could do. It no longer mattered where the rag-thing was or what it did. She was powerless to stop it.

  Golden light fluttered down through the ghostwoods by the well. Shadows kissed back and forth across her face. She wanted the light to dissolve her, absorb her, reflect her off the stones, into the sky.

  The bent, maggot form of the rag-thing covered the sun, haloed in streaming white light. It was trying to pull her out of the house. But for some reason it wasn’t succeeding. It looked at her not from a face but from a hole, a burrow in that dark cylinder of wrappings. It seemed to regard her as though suddenly surprised and then . . . the cottage took it.

  Sena heard the creature bellow as it tumbled through the air into the room. It sounded like someone blowing across wide hollow pipes to make sound, bass and strange and much softer and more resonant than it was loud.

  The Porch of Sth, connecting to her home like a tension snare, had finally sprung. An invisible force grappled the rag-thing with a vengeance, flinging the enormous grub body with careless childlike violence, repeatedly against the floor.

  Sena held her wound together and fumbled for a hidden latch beneath the stairs.

  From the front of the house something large struck the door. Boards splintered. The sound of talons sunk into wood with a squeak. Then, just as quickly, everything went quiet.