The Last Page (77 page)

Was the night air thrashing the trees so fiercely? She could hear her own breathing. Maybe the sexton was playing a trick. Or had that long, high-pitched, inhuman cry been real? A gorgonian scream out in the hills, echoing off the unseen moons?

Under the estate’s mercurial shadows, Sena perched like a lovely daenid reading the
C
srym T
.

Its pages burst with tumid legends distended out of S
th, rendering minute archaistic details about a place called Jôrgill Deep before it had vanished from a highly theoretical, primordial world.

The stories trembled on baby-soft sheets of vellum, sounding in her head with unsettling naïveté. They spoke of happy times before Davishok and the Rain of Fire—when black pimplota flowered and dulcet laughter echoed through rampant arches and olden citadels burnished by the sea.

But every page she turned whispered of deceit. Every passing sentence conjured menaces and shadow, dusty races known now to be extinct: Gringlings, Ublisi and Syule.

As Sena read, her eyes filled with vague Y
llo’tharnic undulations as great shadows moving under blue. Liquid planets refracted over primeval creatures that hauled themselves beneath the waves in massive pods whose numbers reckoned in the millions.

The
C
srym T
spoke in myth better than a merchant talked money.

Melancholy verse disgorged images of darkling yellow clouds, winds that howled with voices from the stars. With the turn of a page she leapt to cantos concerning times when tendrils black as plasmic crude rose from seas that were not seas—when mountains shifted at the desert’s edge.

The genealogy of nightmares lay before her. Doomed unspeakable names with magic numbers flecked each page. Nested in old thorny strokes of ink, Sena found Gr
-ner Shie: the Faceless One, sleeping while Urebus crawled through his city buried in the N
cr
pa.

When at last she lifted her eyes from the page, she felt dazed. The western sky lurked blue and lightless. One hundred eighty degrees from oncoming night, the sinking sun flared from the east and set fire to the western oaks. Their leaves made a bright patchwork of metallic orange against the horizon.

The
C
srym T
’s howl had dwindled to a gentle whimper like an infant with the croup.

Since the night of the storm, Sena had taken copious notes on the book’s formidable contents. She struggled to draw an outline in her head.

The first section consisted of a preface that had been stitched inside the cover seemingly as an afterthought. Roughly one hundred fifty pages long and written in Dark Tongue, it was from these preface myths that Sena had been struggling to read.

Dark Tongue was a knotty language to decipher, dead as it had been for thousands of years. Like all language it faded inside the parentheses of disuse. Suddenly faced with her lack of practice, Sena now found her mental dictionary maddeningly hard to evoke.