The Last Page (32 page)

The cat looked at her quizzically with a high-pitched chirp, not even half a meow. It seemed like a vocalized question mark that asked many things at once.

Sena noticed food items out of place. The note on the corkboard was missing. She opened her cellar.
The Fall of Bendain
had been taken and her atlas was left open, a page torn out. Her scowl melted into a charmed smile.

Caliph
had
been here. The papers were right.

No matter that luck had not allowed them to meet. She would be in Stonehold soon enough. A broad smile spread across her face.

She laid the rubbings she had made in the Halls on her table and began picking them apart.

A portion of them originated from chapters found in the G
llin Scrolls. Sena’s mother had brought copies of them from Greenwick to the mainland. The copies now belonged to the Sisterhood, but Sena’s memory was good. She licked her thumb, pulled out a book on M
llic glyphs and thumped it open.

Referencing it often for the difficult phoneticized Jingsade spellings proved nightmarish since the glyphs were organized by shape and grouped by meaning and the phonetic representations in Jingsade gave her little clue what the glyphs themselves might look like.

Intuition and the fragmentary knowledge gleaned from Desdae were her only guides. Still, she formulated a workable translation and copied most of it into a thin journal she could take with her.

What is read will unseal

Twice in bird years.

The times are written

On the Island Scroll that

The skies will open.

Where D’l
ig strikes

Quietus comes.

And there will be Three
. . .

To Inscribe the Final Page

With the numbers of Nen.

Sena had hoped for more details. She didn’t find this vague bit of verse compelling in the least. What she wanted was something coherent, real hints at what waited between the covers of the book.

“What is read? What is red?” She liked the wordplay. She imagined this reference pointing to the
C
srym T
. But the homonym didn’t really work in Jingsade.

“Final Page” rang a bell. She had heard that phrase somewhere before. Or maybe she had translated some of it incorrectly. She would have another go at it later. For the moment she was drained.

She shut her journal despondently, gathered up the papers and folded the rubbings in half.

The rubbings went into her pack with the journal. The other notes she took upstairs to the hearth to be burned. As she tossed each page into the flames she noticed how thin N
s looked.

He had been safe here, as she knew he would, but not anymore. He
moved cautiously around the kitchen, sniffing the floor with a pecking motion.

Out of habit, she swept the kitchen, ignoring the stains by the door. Then she picked N
s up and left through the broken front door, walking down to the Stones.

From the Porch of S
th she walked lines to a cromlech in southern Mir
yhr where she stayed at a village under a false name. She put as much distance between herself and the Stones as she could but it didn’t matter.

That night she still dreamt of the rag-thing and of giant spectral shapes coiling in the meadow below her house. She dreamt that starry winds above the Porch filled those ghostly shapes like sails; that they had followed her from the Halls, monstrosities that suffused the sky with close, sweet humidity. They drooled otherworldly secretions, congealing across the Porch and beading on her home.

In the dream, she could feel them gazing at her without true eyes, across dimensions, slavering mouthlessly. Only the weakest of their kind had mouths. The book had drawn them. Maybe Megan was right. Maybe she had drawn their attention by binding one of them to the cottage. But she didn’t doubt, with the
C
srym T
in her pack, at some point the Y
llo’tharnah would have found her just the same.