The Last Page (91 page)

King Lewis’ mind went blank and Sena rummaged in it, semimethodically, as if searching a head of lettuce for bugs. She found all kinds of things. She knew why Lewis’ chest hurt.

It had started after a squad of Iscan military personnel had escorted him forcefully back to Isca Castle. Alani’s men had discovered his alliance with the Pandragonians.

Lewis himself had helped smuggle the solvitriol blueprints out of the country.

But he hadn’t confessed or denied. He had simply stood, chest hurting, wishing that he hadn’t been caught.

Lewis knew the Pandragonians and so Sena knew them too. She saw them clearly in his head. Bjor
n Amphungtal and Msgr. Pratt.

She knew how they had stopped on their way to Isca Castle on the second of Kam, pausing at Kennan Keep to meet with Roric Feldman. They had moored. They had disgorged great piles of weapons and supplies onto Saergaeth’s new flight deck. They had signed contracts and promised to help remove Caliph from the throne in exchange for favorable trade agreements once Saergaeth took the throne.

And that was Lewis’ secret: that Pandragor and Yorba and several
other countries were watching Stonehold’s civil war with vulture eyes. That other countries had become intimately involved in Stonehold’s civil war and were counting on Caliph Howl to lose.

The ambassadors that had flown to Isca Castle had only ever been a ruse. Deals had already been cut with the Shr
dnae Sisterhood, with Saergaeth, with Peter Lark.

David’s set of blueprints had already been sent south.

And now Pandragor would be sending zeppelins, actual troops to bolster Saergaeth’s mighty fleet.

For the first time, Sena understood with sudden numbing fear, the precarious position of Caliph’s reign. The impossibility of any chance that he would succeed. She swore in a whisper.
Saergaeth was going to win!

Sena withdrew from Lewis’ brain, lobotomized the memory of her, locked the door and crept spiderlike back to her bedroom. The guards would wake, confused to find the shattered vial, and that would be her only trace.

Sena did not sleep that night. She pondered instead how she might use the
C
srym T
to help save her king.

²⁵
U.T. Approximate pronunciation: Cal’cr’Nok.

When Ghoul Court is cleaned, it is like doing a thorough brush across the front of the city’s teeth, the visible gunk comes off. But the more conniving criminal element sinks further out of sight. Sena sees them with her new eyes, waiting in Isca’s deepest cavities and cracks. She dreams of them at night, moaning creatures in the sewers, far below the opera house, bellowing a nameless emotion.

She can no longer talk about what she sees. Her eyes are healing, the corneal layers gelling into a single lens, a single filter that delivers transcendent messages to her mind. She cannot talk about what she sees because there are no words to describe. Only old words. Words that call things as they used to be, not as they are now. Once she saw a chair, a gas lamp, a wine bottle. Now she realizes that what she saw was really only what she thought.

Adumbrations.

She used to see sketches of meaning, instantaneous renders of objects flickering through her mind. She could categorize them quickly, use them as signposts, directional cues. But now she understands that it wouldn’t have mattered how many adjectives she attached to the wine bottle, or how closely she might have studied it with her old eyes. Even if she had measured it, weighed it, calculated its yaw pitch and roll, its potential kinetic energy, its tensile strength
. . .

A textbook full of wine bottle statistics would have still been an approximation. A pile of different disconnected thoughts.

Now she sees. She sees the whole bottle. She sees its layers unified, interpreted and as it is. She sees it emotionally, potentially, with sunlight streaming through, casting colors and shadows. She sees it in every possible light. Every angle, temperature and locale. She sees it physically, every molecule, every particle in its composition. She sees it chronologically before it is a bottle, being made into a bottle, as a bottle now. She sees it broken, shattered, molten, every kind of death. She sees it spiritually,
diagramed in ether, its eternal planning in a thought. She sees it lovely, as a sentimental gift, a talisman, embodying the memory of a celebration, an anniversary, a first drink, a last drink, a love, the method of seduction, a habit, something forgotten or ignored, a bauble, an implement of cruelty and limitless torture. She can still call it a bottle. She remembers the old word. But the word is empty and cannot pass any of the bottle’s meaning as she sees it now, nothing of the true thing.

And it is not just the bottle that she sees this way. It is everything in the world.

She sees all objects not as symbols but as they are, whole, unified, with nothing lost in translation between her consciousness and her eyes. She sees the thing, all things. Directly. And this, she understands suddenly, is also the power of the
C
srym T
.

Inverted.

She has realized. The problem with other books is their length and imprecision. So many sentences, ideas, chapters . . . all tied together perhaps, but fragmented . . . hidden, buried in the pages. The concepts must be explained, diagramed, with paragraphs, examples, forcing the words to do their job, to communicate clearly all the steps of cooking veal, or building a centrifuge, or getting along with one’s lover. And in the end, there are bits that stick, like a red flower in the grass, the main idea or several key ingredients. The mind sorts through the pile left behind, the chunks it can remember.

But not in the
C
srym T
.

In the
C
srym T
,
the Inti’Drou glyphs are so much more than blueprints for systems, for worlds. They are not just symbols on a page. Inti’Drou glyphs are nothing less than the objects they describe. Not pictograms. The math of the thing is there, trapped, twisted into
lian ink. The math is alive. Compressed. Like in a spring. Undo the latch, release the mechanism, and the glyph unfolds, into planets, into creatures, into stars and subdimensions. The glyphs are more than real. They are reality.