Caliph looked across the room, fifteen feet at most, and suddenly he saw it. Dark brown and spongy. Glittering with intricate wires. Where the umber bone was not exposed, a skullcap of green carpeted it. The thing leaned into a pile of corruption that must have been Arkhyn Hiel’s forearms—as if his body had finally given out while resting his head on the desk. As Caliph approached it, he saw a sprinkle of bright pink spore caps quavering in a tiny cluster on the brow.
In that moment that Caliph viewed the skull of this stranger, all the books Sena had given him, all the passages she had marked, broke free from their association with her. They stopped representing her designs, her cryptic research, her plunge into something he could never understand. And instead, suddenly, whether by her design or not, they belonged to him. They were for him. Suddenly what had happened to him as a child had a context. He understood it in a broader theater. It was not his fault. It had never been his fault.
“I don’t want revenge,” said Caliph.
It isn’t revenge, Sena thought at him. It’s your moment to be free. Take it.
Caliph looked at the thing on the desk. Its face was a travesty.
Both sockets had been filled with heavy black jewels and on the upper row of teeth, a third gem replaced one of the incisors. The whole head was wrapped in a thin filigree of platinum wires, delicate as thread. Despite much of them being buried in moss, they reminded Caliph instantly of the lines on Sena’s skin.
Caliph heard Sena cry out with a mixture of surprise and pain.
He didn’t know whether crushing this head would somehow fix everything or whether this was about his own personal salvation but he picked up the skull.
The platinum wires crumpled. Some of the bone had been replaced by a soft, green film. His fingers crushed through this slimy membrane to a slippery jagged interior that swarmed with fat, segmented life. Tiny creatures poured out of every available orifice.
Caliph swore and dropped it.
It disintegrated on the floor into a shattered mess of black and green and wet-gleaming metal.
And then there was only cricket song again.
The sound in the wind lost cohesion and dissolved into something naturaclass="underline" a breeze blowing in from the sea.
He bent down and plucked one of the gems from where it sparkled on the floor. When he did, he felt an immediate chill, then Sena was standing beside him, looking frightened. She was holding out her hand.
* * *
TAELIN had trouble hearing. She could still make out amphibian chirps and barks wrapping around the restaurant’s brick-framed windows but she had also noticed that one of her ears was bleeding.
A few moments ago, she had heard Baufent say, “They’re going to find us.” But now the doctor wasn’t talking anymore. In fact she wasn’t even sitting across from her at the table. Baufent had disappeared.
It didn’t matter. Past and present didn’t matter, praise the Omnispecer. All that mattered was the future, which Taelin could see. The future was bright and golden.
Taelin did not fantasize about changing things. The past was the past.
Except maybe for Corwin.
She had that one clear memory of him, before he became High King of the Duchy of Stonehold and got her pregnant. A clear picture of his smiling face as the two of them sat on the cement steps of her grandmother’s house. He held a stick in one hand, that he had been using to play with those tiny red bugs. So simple back then. She couldn’t remember how the house had caught on fire. She supposed that was the one thing she would change. Because it wasn’t fair that she had sent him inside to rescue her box of colors—and the necklace.
She bent the demonifuge back and forth between her fingers, working the soft cool metal with a vengeance.
Poor, beautiful Corwin with his lovely brown skin and cobra eyes. She remembered him nearly making it out of the house as the door frame collapsed on top of him in a salvo of fire and heavy timber.
It had crushed him and simultaneously hurled him down the steps and into the backyard. Then her father had drunk the tincture and disappeared. She had picked the necklace up and noticed the tiny red bugs streaming down the foundation, hurrying from the flames for the safety of the grass.
If she could change anything, that would be it. She would bring her dead king back to life.
“Corwin … Corwin…”
Taelin stared into the demonifuge. Its color was like the inside of a fire barrel in the cold streets of Isca. Palmer stood beside her, looking in.
“Should I do it?” she asked.
Palmer passed her a beggary blunt and shrugged. “You gotta do the right thing,” he said.
“I know. I don’t really think she needs my help. But that’s the brilliant part of being a god I suppose: you give over the handling of things to other people … almost like a gift.”
Palmer looked at her like a devotee with those pure blue eyes.
Then Taelin heard the necklace snap.
The orange-yellow bliss in the fire barrel expanded dramatically.
Taelin stared into her hands at the broken setting. The cold golden light that was not a light swelled between her hands. Like the mouth of a bag opening, she thought. So lovely.
Albescent yellow sea foam glowing at dawn. Lovely cold mountains like radiant thunderheads ballooned through the stretching aperture. A bright batter. A birthing. It moved like lava underwater but did not dim, or crust over, or solidify. It swelled like a storm wall inside the restaurant. Mustard white. A juggernaut coming.
Taelin gave a little cry as her goddess enveloped her.
The magnificent body slobbered through the fully effaced hole. It dragged whimsical, ghastly improbabilities behind it. A necklace of alien placentas.
* * *
UNDER churning volcanic blackness, red meteorites plunk the ground. There are screaming people. Some crumple when they are struck. Others catch fire. Taelin can see a man with soft green eyes standing in front of her as the rain comes down. His face brims with regret. His hand reaches out to her …
* * *
SENA saw the necklace break.
She watched Nathaniel’s skull, his phylactery, shatter—not at her hands, but at Caliph’s. That had been important to her. That was why he was here. She wanted the victory over his uncle to belong to him. And it did. That part of the ordeal was over. The hurricane of souls devolved into the unfocused milling of the damned. All the dead of Isca floated aimlessly, confused ghosts in the jungles of the south.
There would come a time, as the twisted eons burnt down, that little by little, Taelin’s soul might escape—one particle at a time—over the course of millennia. One day she might reorganize somewhere in the deep cosmic black—along with Nathaniel.
The stars were full of ghosts.
But that time would not come soon.
As the necklace opened Sena heard a crackle in the sky. This was the place Nathaniel had found, at Ooil-Uauth, which had taken lifetimes to solve, to pinpoint the spot where the second door would open. Sena looked up at the two stars that still flanked the moon. So bright. Unconnected with this world’s constellations. This moment was Sena’s chance, but Nathaniel’s assault had interfered with her strict schedule. Naen was free. Naen was ravenous. And Naen was coming.
Huge ruffled pseudopodia uncurled, delicate and beguiling. Naen took no special notice of the souls she absorbed. Taelin had been drawn into the ever-swelling lung-like recesses of her extra-dimensional form. Buildings melted. Streets cratered. In Bablemum, paid with the Sisterhood’s blood to leave the jungles empty, to not be present in the ruins of Ooil-Uauth when the second door opened, the Lua’groc burned as the End of the World was finally born.