The Last Page (100 page)

But then, while the heavens went berserk, something happened that she had not expected. The snow hovered, retreated, fell backward, the dawn eclipsed by unseen mass. Some continental shadow spread like an infection below the maggoty celebration in the sky.

No thunder.

No sound.

Just freezing silence across miles of air.

And then the distant zeppelins buckled like red gelatinous creatures caught in riptide. Not just Saergaeth’s airships, but the High King’s as well. She saw them fold in on themselves and vanish from the sky. The armies on the ground, every building west of the Hold, was unmade. Even the clouds, the great storm front moving west, evaporated like a clot of steam.

Sena felt the plurality of their deaths as an impact in her chest. So many people at once! But the madness in the sky was not done yet. Its glassy writhing mass surged toward her. It homed in on her position atop the battlements, spreading east. Sena steeled herself. She felt the temperature drop suddenly and then: the godling-stain exploded a second time, thrusting from its hole like something hidden in a shell. Its untamed limbs skewered the clouds, then curled, as if gripping prey before pulling back into the void.

Sena looked down to find herself lying on the roof amid shattered chunks of ice. Her naked flesh had gone mausoleum gray.

There was nothing anymore. Nothing on the wall. Nothing covering her skin. The curl of smoke, the whisperer, had dissolved if it had ever been there at all.

Sena looked down at herself, albescent with an oyster-colored glow. Whorls of blue flickered under her fingernails, luminescing. Her body had been extraordinized under an obscene stylus. She looked at the patterns and laughed out loud. “I see! I see!”

Zeppelins hit the city from the east. They drifted in over Monk Worm, dropped chemical bombs in Daoud’s Bend. They were from Vale Briar, ignorant of the fact that Saergaeth and his entire armada had disappeared.

The city fumed and hissed. Two war engines, left to protect Isca, erupted in sudden fire. Gargoyles exploded as gun-stones passed between tower and sky. The glowing ornate face in Maruchine’s clock tower imploded. Coped gables were blown away. Crockets fell in a heavy rain of carven stone. They broke like ice against the street. Rent pipes spewed steam in ugly patterns on avenues suddenly alive with running people.

Sena heard the Klaxons from her prone position on the other side of Isca Castle. But time had fractured.
Is this the past? Is this the present?
The western skies were dark. The Pplarian guns had ceased to fire. She couldn’t see a trace of battle in the clouds.

She rolled her head to the left.

On the turret roof a sprinkling of hollow metallic granules rolled sorrowfully in the wind, inches from her cheek. A bitter fume wafted from them.

There were stones missing. Great blocks displaced like knocked-out teeth.

Something had coddled her in that brilliant terrible light. Something had stroked her like a tongue, beautiful and languorous and left her in this state of dread.

Sena tried to move but could only fumble. Her vision was skewed in
new indefinite ways. She could see magnetic bands across the sky. The city’s architecture looked slippery and unreal.

Her head throbbed.

In the west, nothing stirred. She looked between the battlements, past a star, through a distant galaxy and into someplace lightless and deep.

The explosion tore her eyes back, up, or down . . . completely disoriented. An orange blossom. A pinwheel. A zeppelin on fire. She watched the
Byun-Ghala
tip into Isca Castle. Metal screamed against stone.

Sena spun. Her limbs were weak like molten candy. Her eyes refused to blink. She was looking at the accident. The airship crunching like an accordion against the castle cliffs. She was looking at the sun.

Time stutterd.

Snow or ash dwindled beyond the windows.

People stirred. Men in red coats. Cycles of light and dark. Sena’s eyelids fluttered open just in time to catch a dark shadow flicking over the room as a sheet of melting snow fell past the glass. She heard whispers.

“The High King is dead.”

The story came to her in pieces. His airship had left the battle, racing back to Isca in an effort save his life. The details were still foggy. A hawk had brought a note stating that Caliph had needed transfusions and surgery. Stat. The
Byun-Ghala
had escaped granulation, only to be hit by Saergaeth’s smaller front coming from the east. That offensive had stopped quickly when it was realized that Saergaeth himself had been vaporized with the rest of his fleet. But it was too late. By the time they surrendered, the
Byun-Ghala
had already been hit, crippled, crushed against the castle.

Sena sat up in Caliph’s bed. A doctor in a red coat looked at her from across the room with a terrified expression. She saw the
Herald
on a nearby stand, read the headlines in the largest, boldest typeface available to the press. Three words covered the entire page.

HIGH KING SLAIN!
And below it:
B
RT VANISHED LIKE FALLOW DOWN!
Perhaps people will start calling the town “Burnt” even though it doesn’t rhyme, like they call Fallow Down, “Fallen Down,” like Stonehavians have always used humor to deal with crippling loss.

What?
How could she think about that! How could she be distracted from the headlines proclaiming Caliph’s death? There was a low ringing like tinnitus: musicians in the grand hall, she realized, playing subtle fugues. Why was the doctor staring at her so strangely?

Sena looked through the walls of the bedroom to where the High King’s body lay surrounded by several thousand candles that melted the grand
hall into a dignified but ritualistic-looking cave. Around him, tapestries hung like chthonic draperies and flowstone.

Gadriel entered the bedroom. His eyes were red and frightened, devoid of their usual brightness. He nodded to her, almost shaking, and placed several embossed envelopes on a tortoiseshell table before stepping backward, shrinking, almost creeping away.

“Condolences are pouring in,” he whispered.

Am I . . . gods, what’s happening?

“Gadriel?”

His answer to her question was tense and fearful. “You are the queen. The Council, what is left of it, called a meeting . . . last night. With the exception of General Yrisl, all of our ranking officers are . . .” He stopped.

Obviously there were too many details to explain. Too much horror behind the reason. “You are queen of Stonehold, my . . . lady. According to the vote.”

Impossible! They would never
. . .

Gadriel and the physician left the room, not waiting for her reply.

Sena got up. A whisper etched the air inside her left ear. Nothing intelligible. The gas lamps had been put out until shipments of metholinate could be resumed. There were candles all around. She took a bath, got dressed and sat down in front of her vanity. She stared into her eyes where the black islands of her pupils had been buried under a brilliant flood and then, slowly, took notice of her skin. There were markings, shimmering and pale, nearly invisible. Distinctly, from far away, she could hear an old man’s voice . . . humming.

“Ha! Clever Pun. And so like tattoos they now seem to me!” His voice sounded whimsical.

She echoed it. Whispered it to herself. “The Last Page.”

The memory was hard to grasp, sleek and slithery, the instant that the sky had gone wild, but pieces of what had happened were falling into place. The gill-like slits . . . her body opening like a flower . . .

These tattoos must be the scars! But they’re so . . . beautiful!

Head to toe, they covered her. Fully healed into elegant designs.
What had the Thae’gn been trying to do? Strike that! What
did
it do . . . to me?

Something was wrong.

She had just realized that she wasn’t breathing. She was sitting at the mirror, thinking . . . not breathing. Frightened, she drew air in through her nose. She could feel it pull down into her throat, cool, crisp, she could feel it filling her lungs, a pleasant chilly expansion. Relieved, she noticed that she could smell. She could smell so acutely that it reminded her of
when she had been a child. The faint dampness of the wood at the windowsill. The pleasant waft of her perfume bottles and lipstick tubes. And then she realized that she wasn’t breathing again.

She inhaled. Exhaled. Inhaled. Exhaled. Everything worked. She stopped. Seconds passed. No panic. She flipped open her watch. A minute passed. Nothing. Five minutes passed without a breath. She didn’t need to breathe.

She remembered the terrified expression on the doctor’s face, the way Gadriel had seemed frightened of her.
What’s happened to me?

She checked her pulse.

Nothing.

She felt under her chin, cupped her hand under her left breast. Nothing. She felt herself. She was warm, except for the tattoos. Fear rising, she took a hat pin from her vanity and stabbed her finger.

It didn’t bleed. It didn’t even hurt.

She rubbed her fingers together. They weren’t numb. She could feel the brush of one against the other. She found her kyru and sliced into her palm.

For a moment, the flesh parted, but she had the distinct impression that it had done so only because she had desired it to happen. There wasn’t any blood. Shocked, she sliced again, deeper. The skin parted without pain, showing perfect pink muscle tissue all the way to the bone. The skin fell back together without so much as a mark. Not a trace. Perfectly whole.

And she wasn’t breathing.

She examined her tattoo-scars in the mirror, the way they carved her up with screaming lovely poems. She recognized the designs from the
C
srym T
. Inti’Drou glyphs. The Thae’gn had written on her.

Slowly it began sinking in that the entity hadn’t actually attacked her. Even when her intestines had been dangling in the wind and her skin had been flayed open like a tattered kite, it had never attacked her. It had done something on its own, outside her small sphere of logic, like a lab technician re-engineering some small speck of life in order to study it. And then,
They
had used her.

It felt mysterious and sinister but mostly it felt invasive.
What did They do to me?

But, in the same self-exploratory moment, Sena felt like she could already answer that question.