The Last Page (98 page)

Sena looked at it closely. It was no less odious under the castle’s metholinate lights.

From a distance, it might have passed as a hideous human head infected with gigantism. But closer up its brow curved too sharply back in a drastic ovoid dome stippled with dark occasional hair. The ears were tall, multipointed and labyrinthine beyond the folds of subterrestrial echolocators. Once soft and sallow, the flesh was now hard and speckled like the eggs of feral birds.

Its nose was snubbed despite the bestial protrusion of its snout. The lips were broad, thin and indescribably cruel.

“Took a dozen chemiostatic spears to bring it down,” said the huntsman.

Sena felt herself grow cold as she looked at the eyes, placed by the taxidermist beneath drowsy alien lids. Their smooth black surface glistened. Midnight waters without whites. A nictating membrane slipped up at an angle, forming a milky sheath that clung laconically across the glass’s bathyal deeps.

In the reproduction, Sena could only imagine the cosmic blackness of the originals. The replicas had been flecked by the taxidermist’s hand with ever deepening layers of tiny golden motes that glittered in the great hall’s light like twin galaxies.

“The body is being sliced into cross sections and inserted into panes at Grouselich Hospital. It will be pickled. No doubt to be a key attraction at the Ketch Museum.” The taxidermist spoke as if everything were bright.

Sena paged through the report that said ten men had lost their lives during the hunt, victims of the creature’s teeth and claws.

She examined the jaws, protruding hinges that exposed multiple rows of fangs. She shivered before the trophy’s insensible gaze and defiantly extended her finger. Something compelled her to touch it. She needed to know, on a visceral level, that it was real.

But feeling its death did little to reassure her. On the contrary, it made what she had read in the
C
srym T
all the more frightening because something was happening.

For several nights, since she had hurled her formula at Skellum, she had felt
Them
. . . primordial bodies stirring, churning through lurid ghastly throes.

Horrors far richer and more rarefied than the
whose head was being hung in Caliph’s hall, crooned strangely through the ether. Sena could feel them in the castle, inchoate forms, reverberating, trembling: monstrous catacombs of flesh.

Flesh was an approximation.

“They are my gods,” Sena whispered. She could not see them, even with her eyes.

“Excuse me?” said the huntsman.

Sena ignored his incredulous expression and left the grand hall without excusing herself. She wandered out into the icy halls, feeling dizzy, not knowing where she was going. A whisper pulled her down a passageway she had never used before, drawing her into a deserted tourelle. From its windows she could see occasional flickers of purple light through the glass, stammering from the Pplarian guns. Seven miles out, war was raging and she knew that Caliph was losing.
I need to help him
. . .

But the thought was blurry, strangely inconsequential, like the memory
of something she had meant to do but then changed her mind. Sena whispered in the dark. “Soon . . .” She heard scratching voices in her head, like the needle on a phonograph with no recorded sound.

“Soon, soon.”

Her skull churned. A bottle full of newts. The whisper that had pulled her here was familiar now. Old and damp and chilly. Disjunctly, it induced the smell-memory of decomposing leaves. “Soon . . .” Around her, the forgotten baggage of a dozen High Kings seemed to brood. Fur cloaks, carved coffers and ugly diplomatic gifts nested like lonesome birds in the loft, dreaming darkness and betrayal.

Sena looked out through the dirty panes at the snow-covered land. Tentacles of light filled the sky, oozing between the mountain peaks.

She watched the veils slowly ebb and ruffle. The tentacles were breaking up as dawn approached. They refracted and moved over the north.

She stepped closer to the window, felt the filthy panes rattle in the wind. She rested her palms against the glass and mused that maybe, just maybe, she was going mad.

An anomalous noise from overhead jolted her back to reality.

An old man’s whisper licked her ear canal. “Go up.”

There was a wooden staircase that pulled down. Above it, a trapdoor glowered in the ceiling. Sena scowled and pulled the rope. The staircase lowered with a creak. This particular turret did not connect with the rest of the battlements. It hung alone in a forlorn crevice of the castle’s northwest face like an unnoticed tick in a vertical fold of hardened skin.

There were no conventional means to reach its rooftop except the rusted door.

Sena took hold of the bolt with both hands.

Perhaps it’s something flapping in the wind.

The sound came again. Precise. Betraying intent. The bolt popped back suddenly, scraping her knuckles on burred iron. She swore. Hesitantly, she put the back of her shoulder against the door.

Ice crackled. A cold dark wind whistled in as she managed a half-inch crack. She pushed with every muscle in her body, relaxed and took another step, working her way expertly up the rickety stairs, maximizing her leverage.

Finally the heavy hinges gave a painful snap and the trapdoor swung all the way open, smashing back against the roof, a thick sheet of ice shattering in every direction.

A square of cloudy sky grumbled overhead. Despite the crushing cold, she wasted no time pulling herself up.

The turret’s architecture formed a small octagon, obscure and shadowed by the castle’s walls. From its solitary rooftop she gazed down on Stonehold wrapped in snow from a perspective that obscured the city.

To the north there was something black, as if a giant had thrown a fistful of mud at the castle wall. It clung, oblique, opaque, hiding in the gloom of the castle’s own acre-wide shadow. The air around it trembled as though thick fumes like fuel vapor, heavier than air, drooled out of it and down across the frozen moat. That, or parts of its shape were slavering back out of physical space, into the ether.

“Why are
You
here?” she whispered.

The massive thing did not move. It wavered. It writhed almost and seemed to slurp at the sky even though it made no sound. It did not move from its position on the wall. A point of light, exquisitely bright, shivered in its central void, surrounded by other lights, all of them the color of welding sparks. Its exact shape was impossible to tell, even for Sena’s eyes, because it seemed to have an invalid structure. The more she looked, the more it occurred to her that it was somehow imploded, a re-entrant polygon, though softened and organic, a mushy concavity or hole rather than any shape at all. Light bent around it. It exuded cold.

One of Them.
One of the Thae’gn. Maybe it was the one she had bound to protect her at the Porch of S
th, responsible for utterly discreating the flawless Lua’gr
c that had attacked her in her home. Maybe it was from the Halls under Sandren. One of the Hidden. A black lump of mucus, a cancer of space. Gleaming.

The lights inside it fizzled in and out of sight except for the great one at its center. Like a cell, that bright gleaming nucleolus surrounded by cosmic black cytoplasm, shimmering lysosomes . . .

She was making up metaphors primarily because she had the feeling that, even with her new eyes, she wasn’t seeing it correctly, as if the gigantic thing refused to translate properly through any kind of sight.

There was no communication from it. Nothing she could sense, except for the logical assumption that it had been drawn here by the book . . . just like its lesser cousin whose head hung in the great hall. Sena envisioned more of them, attracted by the
C
srym T
, cementing themselves like barnacles to Isca Castle, great abysmal vacuums of them. Deep plastered colonies of empty holes, drawing together like negative cells, building a gulf of tissue, a void, a parody of oyster flesh around a pearl, growing over the irritation of the book.