The Last Page (88 page)

She pushed the book away.

I can’t avoid it. In moments I’ve lost centuries
.

Words in Dark Tongue made sounds inside her skull. They searched for sustenance and found nothing.

I will fix my eyes,
she thought.
I will master this thing.

She picked the scalpel back up, made sure her bowl and rags were ready. Carefully, carefully, she began to cut into her eye.

She felt the blades touch her cornea, slide into it at an angle. The clear coat flopped up, granting access to the lens. Her movements were subtle, careful. She whispered as she went, using tiny bleeding capillaries to work the Unknown Tongue. She crafted facets with the double knife, cut inscriptions that would have made a miniaturist gape. There were numbers. There were shapes. Angles and circles and tiny triangles engraved on multiple layers of cornea. She cut her eye into thin sheets of film, put diagrams on various strata, sandwiched them together, compressed them.

She dabbed at her tears. An endless gush of fluid poured across her face. Finally she was done.

Now . . . the other eye.

After several more hours, throbbing in pain, she slipped the mask over her head. It was dark but the Inti’Drou glyphs still floundered in her brain. She concentrated on something simple, something capable of restoring her identity. She thought of Caliph and the way Prince Mortiman had looked at him.

Sena woke up blind. She could feel the mask working on the swelling. Like a smell-feast, the shylock was actually a more docile cousin of the
scarlet horror. It was brown, silent and sleepy. It could be cut and sewn like a sheet of leather in order to fashion gloves or boots. This one had been hibernating in her pack for two years. She felt its gentle suction on her swollen eyes.

She fumbled for the bed. Caliph’s side was still made, pillow undisturbed beneath the quilt. “Caliph?”

She was seeing things, bits of light that could not be light. The shylock kept her in darkness.
Am I hallucinating?

She got up. She could tell where the fireplace was. She could see it, snagged against the wall like a tuft of cotton in a thicket. It moved. It was ephemeral. Its shadows seemed to breathe. The room swayed as if underwater. Sena stumbled and fell. She felt blood trickle down her cheek.

“Godsfire!” Her head hurt. Her bladder was going to explode. “Caliph?” Bluish impressions tracked across her cerebellum from the right. She turned as if toward a light, smacked her forehead on the bed. “Yella by
n! Fuck!” She reached out, touched the wooden pillar, groped past it, trying to make sense of what she interpreted as sight. She tried to shut her eyes then cursed at her stupidity. She couldn’t close her mind against the impressions even with the shylock clinging to her face. “Mother of Mizraim I have to pee!”

The shylock left its presence in her blood and forced her kidneys to work overtime. She wondered how long she had been asleep.
I can’t make it!
She thought of the agonizing walk to the toilet.

Pastel colors rinsed her brain. She could see the bank of windows in Caliph’s bedroom. She reached out, walked toward them, uncertain they were real.

One of the panes swung in and folded against the wall admitting a chilly mass of air, fresh with rural smells.

She undid her belt.

The ledge beyond the room was wide and deep and draped in cool blue. Diamonds of gold sparkled on the tower’s skin as the sunlight crept east, dragging over rough stones, catching every chink and mortar line. The colors were bizarre. Too saturated. Too bright.

Below the castle wall, architecture snarled and stirred as part of some remote world seen through veils of dream. Her pants unsnapped on either leg and crumpled to the floor in leather folds. Thin metallic sounds and indistinct voices curled out of the Hold. Her mind bucked again at the realization that she was not seeing anything.
What if I fall?

She climbed out onto the ledge, clothed only from the waist up and the knees down. She set her boots several feet apart and leaned back on
her palms. Like one of the grotesques on Hullmallow Cathedral, she perched at the brink of disaster.

The cool air felt delicious; it mouthed her vulva and sent a tingle through her. She relaxed and allowed herself to foul the sky. Her boots grated. She moved backward on her palms, withdrawing into the room. She resnapped her pants, found the basin, washed and sat down.

She was dizzy. She thought about taking the shylock off but reconsidered. Although she wanted to try her new eyes on the
C
srym T
, she would have to wait. Other sisters had warned to keep the shylock on for several days. She laid back across the bed, dreaming that the ceiling moved with impossible colors.

I can’t sleep.

She got up and left the room.

General Yrisl passed her in the hall. He looked at her, assumed she couldn’t see him and raised an eyebrow in what must have been a hint of scorn. He was in a hurry, still buttoning his shirt. Sena’s brain saw everything: his torso, muscular but slightly flabby at the same time, white with the telltale sag of middle age. She dreamt past his shirt, through the fibers, caught a glimpse of something dark and twisted at the center of his belly. A twirl of ink. A shadow, small and indistinct, nested behind a thick patch of hair.

Only then did she recognize his faded resemblance to the tall gaunt forms of Mr. Naylor and his friends. His glassy eyes contained a redoubling significance, suddenly odious.

“General?”

He turned, surprised. “Yes, ma’am?”

“Nothing. I just wondered if it was you.”

“Yes, ma’am. I have to hurry. The
Byun-Ghala
is leaving.”

“Where is it going?”

“I’m sorry.” He sounded sincere. “I’m afraid it’s classified.”

She let him go, terrified of the sudden symbology associated with him.
But was it real? Was it true?
She dreamed where he was going and picked a route that would let her watch him unobserved.

She avoided the main corridors, not wanting to be seen. Some crazy girl walking with a blindfold. She felt ridiculous.

She skirted through rooms and hallways, picking her way toward parts of the castle that did not see regular use. Finally she came to an oriel that overlooked the zeppelin deck. From here she could sense Caliph’s luxurious airship ballooning over the huge expanse of concrete and old stone, casting pincushion shadows from its outspread spines.

Yrisl was marching across the field of masonry toward a body of knights whose huge ornate carapaces glittered with colors like emeralds and rust.

At the center of the knights she sensed Caliph leaning against a stack of chiseled gun-stones.

As the Blue General approached, Caliph seemed to levitate slowly like oil smoke in the frosty air. The knights shuffled. Some conversation took place. Then the whole party headed for the docking tower.

Sena still couldn’t make sense of it. Had she imagined the mark on Yrisl? It confused her enormously. He had been less than six feet from the
C
srym T
on many occasions. It had rested in the high tower in plain sight. If he was from the Cabal, why had he not seized the book?

Her thoughts went back to the night it had disappeared from the desk in Caliph’s bedroom only to reappear in the same place.

She sensed the party of knights had come out onto the tower roof, into thin sunlight. They were followed by Caliph and Yrisl. They boarded the
Byun-Ghala
while men in dark leather made adjustments to several new-looking weapons that jutted from the airship’s belly.

Silvery gadgets with smooth, organic-looking segments, hoses and ornate gears hung from refitted turrets. Sena recognized the craftsmanship from other sources she had seen around the city as being (possibly) of Pplarian design.

Almost as soon as the bridge lifted away, the zeppelin’s engines gave a slurred whine. Heavy fan blades poured air across the fins, dislodging the ship like an enormous bumblebee from some gruesome flower. It hovered, clumsy at first, moving in imperceptible increments, inches at a time.

It turned. It raised. Its turrets spun. Spines bristled. Guns shone. The blue pennant of the High King uncoiled, a silken lioncel, a serpent of cloth unwinding in the zeppelin’s wake. Then the airship found itself between the castle’s piled spears of stone. It no longer moved in inches or feet but sprang, bloated with sluggish violence, a bullfrog leaping out between towers, hauling its girth west.

Sena felt it go. A strange sensation of abandonment distilled within her. He hadn’t even said good-bye. The image of him lounging against the cannonballs seemed frozen in her mind.

She made her way from the oriel to their bedroom, took a bath, brushed her teeth, drank a cup of coffee Gadriel had left by the door and brushed her teeth again.