The Last Page (37 page)

Miriam backed the second man away from the machine, her sickle knife tugging at his skin. A vicious collar that made it impossible for him to swallow. The first man gurgled in agony, holding to the shoulder of the pinned arm with his free hand.

His eyes were glazed.

Miriam’s arms had folded expertly around the second man’s head, locking him in with her blade. As she moved him backward away from the machine, she called out to the first man’s blood, leaking from his arm like engine oil onto the floor. The Unknown Tongue and the Sisterhood’s brand of hemofurtum gathered his holojoules.

She seemed to choke on the throaty sounds that molded the coalescing power.

Then she finished the argument:
¹⁵

The air around the engine wavered like warped mirrors at a carnival, bending space into thin or fat distortions. Parodies of its own self. The trapped man screamed as his body began to colliquate and fuse with the metal.

Miriam froze in horror. Her equation was not supposed to do that. She could only watch in stupefied amazement as her formula went haywire, derailing and turning on itself, mutant and rogue and powerful.

Even the man in her lethal grasp went slack as he watched in fascination something grotesque and wild rippling around the machine.

Megan’s transumption hex wasn’t supposed to have happened yet. But that was what made it so dangerous and why the Sisterhood had pulled all their operators out of Stonehold: transumption hexes leaked unpredictably
through
time. This could easily be a premonition ripple that had seeped backward from the future. Miriam had been expecting repercussions but not so soon, not so violent and random . . . and close. She was the last witch in Stonehold, ignoring her own admonition.

“Where is the book?” she hissed into her captive’s ear, trying to ignore the horrifying results of her equation.

“Book? What book? I’m just a mechanic—”

Miriam pulled back on the bladed collar around his neck just enough that it broke the skin. “You know what I mean,” she whispered. “I want the
Red Book.
I want the
C
srym T
.
”

Normally the W
llin Droul could not be bought or tortured, but this thin-blooded specimen was different. He was close to human, enough that he could be intimidated through violence.

“You are alone,” Miriam whispered, “with a Shr
dnae Witch.” Her words had a visible effect, ending an assortment of possible games he might have otherwise played. He broke immediately.

“We ain’t got it—yet.”

“Yet? Then you must know who has it or where it is.”

She continued to back him away from the disquieting scene by the engine. The equation had resolved, died down like an over-boiling pot.

The first man was dead. It could no longer be determined where his body ended and the machine began. The smell of burnt hair and flesh was catching up to them, flowing outward from the point of violence.

“It’s comin’ to Isca Castle,” muttered the man. His own blood was wet and sticky on his neck. Miriam took him behind the tall movable rack toward
the tank she had landed on when she had first entered the brewery. She stopped.

“Don’t make me ask for the rest,” she breathed.

“It’s comin’ with a girl. That’s all I know. I don’t know when or how. Sometime soon. We’re getting ready. We don’t know where it’s comin’ from. It’s just comin’. That’s all. That’s all, I swear.”

“Does the girl have a name?”

“Something with an
S
I think. They said Sauna or Sara. Something like that. I’m a crawler. They don’t tell me shit. You know that!”

Miriam scowled. Her heart cooled. She bit her lip as her mind began to work.

“Think harder. I need a name. If you can remember all the parts to that engine I’m sure you can remember a simple name.”

“I told you. It’s with an
S
. That’s all I know. It’s like Sema or Suana. I don’t fucking know!”

His distress was genuine, on the brink of being pathetic. But his last attempt had solidified a gut-turning hunch in Miriam’s stomach, something that sickened her at the same time that it gave her hope.

“Was it Sena?”

“Yeah, that’s it.” The man coughed. “I swear I ain’t just playing along. That’s the name I heard. How did you—?”

He dropped to his knees, relinquished from the deadly hold. There was the sound of something landing lightly on top of the tank, then the spring of the metal as it retook its original shape.

By the time the man turned around, Miriam had vanished through the same window she had come through and was running full-out down the alley, turning onto Seething Lane, sprinting down the cobbles, heading for home.

The man swore softly and touched his throat, beginning to formulate a story. Something simple, something he could remember if he was asked to retell it exactly, many times in a row.

When Miriam reached her flat in Maruchine she mounted the iron steps to her window in a winded flurry. She had left the casement open. Cool night air lapped past the tattered curtains, sinking the darkened apartment to a reclusive, somehow impolite temperature.

Miriam had never used the small coal-burning stove that tottered in the corner. She struck a match and lit an oil lamp. Orange light scraped over uneven plaster, revealing a room as exhausted as Miriam after her two-mile run.

She didn’t want to believe that Sena had somehow found the
C
srym T
.
It seemed preposterous that Megan’s protégé could have discovered it and kept it secret when there were so many eyes looking for it, scouring the Hinterlands from here to Yorba.

Maybe Megan had planned it. Maybe she had found the book and given it to Sena to hide and reveal at some later time. A maneuver that would ensure Sena’s ascension to the tunsia circlet of Coven Mother.

No. Megan could not be trusted. Not with this particular information.

The realization filled Miriam with fear. She grew sick to think that she was going behind the Coven Mother’s back. But she had to be sure. She had to treat the man’s words as though they might be true, as though there were no other women named Sena in the north.

Miriam pondered the man she had interrogated. It was always difficult to tell, but she guessed he had told her the truth as far as he knew it. He was a weak link in the Cabal’s chain now. If his own order did not discover his treachery, she might return to him, find him again and extract additional information. It was no danger to leave him alive.

Between a dark cage and a ramshackle sideboard cluttered with bottles, Miriam adjusted the lamp flame and penned a hasty note in Withil, using miniscule letters to conserve space on the tiny roll. In it, she warned of all she had learned, the implications and the fact that the Duchy had been evacuated. All the Sisters that could, had gone through Menin’s Pass into Mir
yhr.