The Last Page (61 page)

“He pressed us to the river and dug in. Now he’s using the river as an easily maintainable line while he secures the keeps in the west as bases for the fleet of zeppelins he’s retrofitting day and night back in Miskatoll.”

“What about King Lewis?”

Yrisl snorted. “The intelligence the Pplarians gave us can’t be substantiated but personally I think you’d have better luck convincing a leper to spare change.”

“So he won’t help, but let’s assume he does. Assume we can convince him.”

“At the very best he’d give you four thousand infantry and a hundred knights. You can count Vale Briar’s zeppelins on one hand.”

“So it’s the zeppelins that will kill us.”

Yrisl nodded. “It’s just a matter of time.”

Caliph signed off on the order for a muster. As the fountain pen scratched across the paper, Caliph felt a terrible premonition.

“Do you think I should tour the field?”

Yrisl tilted his head with a pained expression and gestured as though the matter were highly debatable. In the end, his answer was simple. “No. I wouldn’t count on Saergaeth to move before fall when the leaves are gone and there’s less cover in the woods for our troops to hide. He’ll want maximum visibility. Stark contrast for the bomb sites. Men and machines will stand out even better against snow.

“Our morale will hold. No sense putting you in danger.”

They avoided the topic of Fallow Down as they talked. There simply wasn’t anything to say. Nothing new had come to light and all the papers printed were the speculations drawn by scholars who struggled for the
limelight by claiming expertise in some tenuously related field. In truth no one knew what had happened to Fallow Down.

No one but Sena.

It had been particularly difficult for her to contain her rage when Miriam had gone to the papers in an effort to dislodge her from the castle. Obviously the Sisterhood suspected something. They were turning against her. But she was cut off from them now, with no way of knowing what they knew.

All she knew was that Megan’s hex was working. Finally. A month after the transumption hex, Fallow Down had disappeared. The Pandragonians were getting what they paid for . . . though they had yet to deliver the book to the Eighth House.

Holomorphy had become unpredictable as Gr
-ner Shie’s influence adjusted numbers in the natural world. Vog Foundry had erupted in fungus, great mushrooms sprouting from the holomorphic energies in the furnace. Bilgeburg had nearly shut down. It was in the papers. Things that relied on holomorphy were turning wild. Vog Foundry had hacked out the fungi and gone back to pure coke. Factories adjusted. Chemiostatic power still seemed safe. Sometimes holomorphy worked just fine. But people were crumbling. They took their money out of banks. They stocked up. They stole. There were fires burning in Bl
kton. And Sena didn’t blame them. They relied on the papers for answers and the papers had no answers.

How could they? How could any of the journalists propose that some entity outside rational geometry was trying to eat them?

In reaction to Fallow Down people grieved and shouted in the streets. They wrote poems and articles and threats against the government. Some found purpose and friendship in the lonely urban wasteland by forming groups and posting flyers. They latched on to the tragedy in a peculiarly maudlin way that made less sentimental folks acutely uncomfortable.

Then there were the crasser lot, people without any direct link to the immense loss, whose lives and tiny close-knit circle of friends had been spared any lesson in privation. They grew tired of hearing about Fallow Down and thought up vulgar rhymes and pseudonyms, perhaps as a way of feeling strong in the face of horror, perhaps because they were simply ignorant. But even minority opinions, no matter how outlandish or cruel they seemed, found representation in the thronging streets of Isca.

“Fallow Down the vanished town,” some said. Others shortened the grim nickname to
Fallen Down
.

Sena marveled that Megan’s hex had actually cracked the prison. Like
a histrionic felon scrabbling at the bars of his fabricated cell, Gr
-ner Shie was groping, casting arbitrarily about for anything within reach.

It was not a question of corresponding angles, of physically reaching through a crack. It was a question of hypothetical geometry, of warped space drooling into many different places. A question of imaginary time.

If it had been otherwise, if regular laws had obtained, there would be no Duchy left. If Gr
-ner Shie had been able to see and designate its motions, what had happened at Fallow Down would have happened everywhere at once.

Instead, the incomprehensible thing reached out into different dimensions, into different times. It pawed through optional reality.

Sena didn’t bring it up because there was nothing anyone could do. She understood the danger. It was only a matter of time before the fumbling throes of the otherworldly entity struck Stonehold another lucky blow.

Sena’s mind felt numb. She could only handle so much trauma before her brain shelved the mechanism that processed fear. The horror didn’t exactly go away. Nor did the tension or the stress or the endless hours of waiting before she could try to open the
C
srym T
.

But it was boring horror. Like being confined in a very ugly room that she wanted to paint over. After a while, the anxiety faded and only nausea remained.

To stay numb, she read the papers. The near constant sensationalism had become so familiar that she was beyond being shocked. Instead, it had the reverse effect. The headlines seemed to scream: Chaos is everywhere! Remain calm! Everything is normal!

She moved on to the gossip columns where, at first, it was beguiling to see her name in print. Then she grew bellicose, then phlegmatic and finally entertained.

It was like living an alternate life without any memory and reading about it later. For the sheer amount of information they printed, she thought they would have had to ask her opinion, filled up stacks of notepads.

Now she understood that in order to oblige the insatiability of the masses, fabrication was required.

The High King’s witch.

That was what they called her as they speculated about why holomorphic energy was going wild. Some second-string journalist had coined the phrase. It was catchy enough and able to be pronounced (by the lazy) in an effortless breathy gust. It had stuck.

After finishing yet another defamatory article about her life, Sena
tidied up breakfast and returned to her bedroom . . . his bedroom . . . their bedroom.

It had been thoroughly restored and partially redone. A new ceramic tub decorated with hand-painted roses had been hooked up to pipes from the boiler and sat elegantly in the center of the floor. New carpets, furniture and a massive ornate half-tester stood in state around the room.

Light from the western windows diminished as the sun raced east like a gymnast jumping over the castle toward the sea.

Sena took out the
C
srym T
and ran her fingers over it. She lay on the bed and stroked it. Heard it whisper. Legend claimed its vellum pages derived from stillborns. The notion pained her vaguely.