The Last Page (25 page)

Sena glanced over her shoulder. Just to be safe, she pulled her sickle knife across her horse’s croup. The creature’s orchid colored skin bled black, six tails expressing anguish in a squirming mass.

“Shh—”

She spoke the Unknown Tongue and the tails drooped. The beast’s withers relaxed.

It didn’t hurt to cover her trail.

Shr
dnae Witches tracked by numbers, a kind of dead reckoning based on humidity. If Megan was having her followed, Sena’s pursuers would use coordinates based on the water memories of her own sweat inscribed molecularly into thin air.

She didn’t bother peering for a hidden stalker in the fog. Shr
dnae operatives wouldn’t be anywhere she looked. The tiny numbers they cut into their corneas neatly tabled the pre-echoes of what they called
blind line of sight
.

Sena was in the Seventh House, merited or not, but had decided against making the cuts. Until now, she’d never had a use for better invisibility than what she could manage as a common thief.

Unfortunately, if Megan had put a tail on her, that wouldn’t be enough. She rolled the horse blood into a hemofurtive equation, testing the new concept she’d learned in parliament’s basement, and laid a jumbled trail of numbers in her wake. In answer to water memory, she encrypted air.

On her second day in the Valley of Eloth she left her horse to fend, marching downhill from the road until she found a set of abandoned stone huts near a lake. Ragged green thickets grew in profusion along the shore. She hugged the waterline and made good progress. Her side still
pained her and she rested often but a gnawing anxiety filled her stomach. Eloth belonged to long-toothed predacious things.

Sarchal hounds, with jaws capable of killing a horse, hunted the wilds. And there were other horrors. Enormous black otter-things with tiny malevolent eyes and twitching ears, long dark muzzles bristling with whiskers and gharial teeth. Unknown numbers of them lay in wait below these northern lakes.

Sena kept her eyes open and moved quickly. The undergrowth gave her no choice but to skirt the shore. Eventually the pebbled beach gave way to a shadowed drop-off overhung with flowering thickets. She could see several large fish, backs like dull battered tin, gliding in the murk below.

She scrambled up a soft embankment and found an animal track that led her back to the water through a garden of cattails that sprang from semisolid ground.

She tread carefully on the shifting sod of what seemed to be floating dirt and vegetation. The rich close stench of metholinate burbled up through black, snot-thick water. She couldn’t see four inches down.

After half an hour, breathing through her mouth, the cattails thinned and the track emerged but ended in disappointment.

Sena looked with disgust at a stinking morass of deep feculent mud and squalid pools. Ruby-bellied reed flies darted through the vapor. The mire looked impossible to cross and her trail had given out far from shore.

Her eyes cast about for a way of crossing the muck and landed on a series of large flat rocks. They were east of her, farther out, vulnerable to one of the otter-things but she knew she could leap the distance between them without much strain and decided to risk it.

The hungry flies swarmed, bellies like gemstones. She leapt to the first then the second and in such fashion crossed the inlet.

The insects pursued her until she reached the top of a slide of boulders at the lake’s north end. There, the storm front struck relentlessly and a cold freshet of wind swept the flies back down to their reeking hollows by the lake.

Sena worked her way above the skree.

She moved gracefully. She was trained for this.

After three thousand vertical feet and five miles, the spires and dome of Esma rose slowly into view. It was an ancient thing. Ugly and old like a fractured skull.

She checked her watch as the first small drops of rain began to fall.

From here she could see most of the valley in ominous panorama. All around her, the mountains rose in tortured gray piles, blasted back from the valley’s pit as if by a synchronized cacophony of screams.

Sena climbed into a flat barren clearing before the desolate temple. Perspiration licked tight curls along her neck.

The whole of Esma had been raised in c
ryte, a white rock that held light like velvet. But the closer she got the grayer it looked. Ruinous after eighteen thousand years of storms, if it had not been for the c
ryte’s extraordinary granite-surpassing durability, the whole edifice would have dissolved like a sugar lump. As it was, great chunks had given way. Unseen blocks and entire substructures had slid cataclysmically down with the skree into the lake.

As if someone had plunged broken femurs into the ground, jagged fragile towers, sundered and hollow, stretched with ghastly luxuriance toward the sky. The ruptured dome, graven and blackened by its own encrusted ornateness, pushed fatly at the towers that buttressed its enormous weight. Almost against gravity it seemed to hold together, bulging and loose, gawping and precarious to enter.

Sena watched swallows float in and out of Esma’s orifices. They cast fluid shadows over friezes in the walls.

Inside the immense foyer, leaves and twigs shuffled in the gloom. She entered one of the gargantuan rooms that opened off to either side. In the vaulted space, walnuts rotted in the shadows and the floor had been decorated with inlays.

A vague uneasiness smothered everything. Though the designs were striking, hundreds of long sharp-edged lids overshadowed their beauty. Sunk in the foundations, designed as part of Esma’s vast floor plan, over two hundred crypts rested underfoot. Their lids rose, low, oblique and sharp across the spacious floor.

Sena had walked lines from her cottage to this very spot. There were old stories written in the walls of Esma, vague frightening prophecies. But Sena could not afford to be superstitious. She had been desperate. And in desperation she had hidden the
C
srym T
before stumbling down to find her sisters by the lake. Myhr through P
sh, when the weather was typically mild, the Sisterhood could be found in Eloth, delving into the past, unearthing things from the ruins near Ryhd
l.
⁹
Even so, with the rash of thunderstorms, she had almost missed them.