The Last Page (31 page)

She would need rubbings to take back to her cottage for further study. So engrossed had she become, she barely heard the light grate of metal behind her.

Suddenly, Gavin hurled himself like a block snapped loose from a scaffold crane. As she turned, Sena felt what must have been a long heavy knife strike her shoulder at an angle and glance off the studs of the watchman’s jacket.

She fumbled for her sword, Robert’s sword, and tried to parry, but Gavin was too close. Head down, pressing her against the wall. His knife slashed gainlessly against her rib cage, unable to penetrate the jacket’s heavy leather.

Instinctively she brought her knee up, heard his jaw snap shut with a loose-toothed crunch. A muffled yelp echoed off the carvings and a second plunge of the knife struck the wall just left of her torso.

Gavin smelled of grease and dust. He was small but compact. His weight made her stagger. She felt herself being dragged down and couldn’t tell where his knife was. Her fear had given way to anger. Not this. Not again. She brought her knee up once more, this time striking nothing but air.

But Gavin stumbled backward holding his face. Apparently her first blow had done more damage than she thought.

In the tilted light she could see him swagger like the flame. For a moment it looked like he might give up, then suddenly he lunged again, apparently unaware of Robert’s sword.

Almost with the motion of a dance step Sena caught him on the steel. His knees buckled. The thick hard fingers that had worked years of stone did grasping motions. With hardly a sound, he fell to the floor.

Sena kicked the knife from his hand. He still breathed in a gurgling fashion.

“Who sent you?” Her voice sounded too loud in the darkness.

No answer.

“Who sent you!” she screamed. But it was no use. The stonemason’s life was pooling on the floor.

In a sudden fit she thrust her sword into him once, twice, three times. A spasm shook the body and it lay still.

Sena sank down against the wall by the candle box. She bit back fiercely on her tears. Even trained as a Shr
dnae operative with the attendant skills of the Seventh House at her disposal, she could scarcely contain the angst over this. Her first time.

“You’re a stonemason, not an assassin,” she screamed at the corpse. The word assassin echoed hollowly down the vault. The blood on her sword was thick like syrup and seemed to shrink away from the metal, refusing to coat it with an even film.

Who could it have been? Who could have known she had hired Gavin besides the guild master?

The world felt small. Dangerous. The Halls smelled of Gavin’s intestines tangled with a cloying sweetness she couldn’t name. There was blood on her clothes, on the back of her hand. How had that gotten there? She tried to wipe it off. Instead, it blended into her skin like rouge. Her left hand was definitely ruddier than the other. She felt sick. The smell was making her gag.

I can do this. It wasn’t my fault. He tried to kill me.
But she knew Sandren wasn’t safe anymore. They would find Gavin’s body. Maybe. Maybe not. Gavin said no one else had been here, this deep in the Halls. Even so, he would go missing. The stonemasons would remember that she had hired him. A dog would find him, gnaw off a limb and drag it out. What now?

Going back to the Black Couch was out of the question. Robert had no motive for killing Gavin and besides, the concierge had seen her leave, wearing Robert’s clothes. The weapon couldn’t be left behind. Nothing could be left behind. City detectives would lug iatrophysical gadgetry in to sniff the air. They would analyze molecules. They would dust for prints.

She was beginning to remember her training, to understand how wrong everything had gone. She had made a mess by not planning ahead, not preparing for the contingency that Gavin might have to die. And that was the cardinal rule. Broken.

Rule one: Someone other than you must be available to take the blame.

But there was no one now. No other possible suspect. Sena held her head in her hands.

She muttered in the Unknown Tongue, trying to jumble her molecules in the air. She tried to use Gavin’s blood, use the trick of hemofurtum she had learned in Skellum, to muddle her trail. But the air would not obey.

How had this happened? Was Gavin after the book? She had signed a false name when she bought it.

She spoke again in the Unknown Tongue, this time calling for light. Nothing. A third time but with the same word, she ordered Gavin’s splattered cells to illuminate the air. Quiet thrumming answered but still no sparkle. No sudden incandescence. Gavin’s candle box fluttered pathetically near the floor.

Maybe I’m getting it wrong.
But hemofurtum wasn’t a complicated skill.

She retrieved her pouch of coins as the blackness beyond the lantern seemed to churn. Something slippery against light sidled just beyond the lens’s throw, wrapping around the massive corridor.

Sena let the Unknown Tongue explode from her lungs but the sound echoed away, consumed by the mountain.

She turned back to the wall, closed her eyes, resting her forehead against petroglyphic stone. It felt cool.

Clea’s daughter, Jemi, still took a bottle at night. Sena had washed them out in the sink, cylindrical masses of clotted white, heavy and light at the same time, sliding smoothly past her fingers, vanishing suddenly down the drain.

Here, beneath the mountain, the air was like that. Clotted-milk air. Except it was sweet. Like at the Porch of S4th. She could feel it in the Halls. Poised on the other side of rational geometry. The skin of the only dimension Sena could comprehend bulged around its cyst, its cradle. It moved. A pustule that could roam, sliding like a parasite just beneath the cuticle of real. A monster. Pressing. Struggling to reach her. Pushing its formless mass against the locus of an ancient embryonic sac.

Sena had read about them in the small hours at Desdae. The eggs laid between the branes. The cosmic larvae stretching the membrane of physical space, stretching with alien desperation, disrupting temperatures; drafts; the basic outcomes of subtle natural events: like the striking of a match.

Sena’s holomorphy wouldn’t work.

Whether intentional or an inadvertence of the thing’s impossible presence, Sena’s equations remained unsolved. The math of the surrounding air had been modified just enough that her formula refused to function.

There were myths of daemons carved into the cathedrals of the north, skeletal men with bat wings and scorpion tails. There were old woodcuts in Holthic Scripture of bipeds with wolf heads and hooves and goat tails and huge selachian teeth. But for Sena, who had pored over superlative manuscripts, piecing together the vague and hideous outlines of these starry nightmares, such woodcuts were amphigoric in the extreme.

Real daemons had no concept of anthropomorphism; would not stoop to assume human shape any more than a biologist would attempt to become a laboratory grub in a dish of rotting meat.
Real daemons,
thought Sena,
ignore our narcissistic renditions of evil. Real daemons cannot be fathomed.

Sena shook convulsively. Maybe the daemons in the darkness could
feel the Inti’Drou glyphs. Like oceanic things drawn to Naobi’s lunar glow, certain entities might be compelled toward the book in her pack.

Sena clenched her eyes but she could still feel the horrors behind her. One or several of the Thae’gn, scrabbling silently in the ether.

Their names were laced with nonphysical numbers and could only be written accurately in the Unknown Tongue. Sena rummaged in her pack, trying not to think of those old words.

.
¹²

.
¹³

And most dreadful of all:
.
¹⁴

They were words that twisted in the brain, their pronunciations difficult and the depth of the throaty sounds was lost when translated into Trade.

Slowly, Sena composed herself and pulled a book of blank paper and a box of charcoal from her pack. Like a child in the lantern’s halo, she swallowed her fear and began the long task of rubbing over the inscriptions that stretched out into the infinite and eternal blackness below the Ghalla Peaks.

Sena closed out her Sandrenese bank account and converted her money back into gems. City-state police had already been to her cottage once in the past three months. Still, she had to go home. One last time. She left her spare key with Clea and did not say good-bye to Tynan.

When she arrived, she found her cottage more or less how’d she left it with the exception of her missing horse.

“Did you chase away the brigands?” she whispered to N
s. Maybe the police had confiscated her horse.