The Last Page

by Anthony Huso

  “Crossed my mind,” he said.

  She settled behind him and spoke directly into his ear. “That’s quite a headline: HIGH KING IS WITCH-FUCKING HORSE THIEF. Where are we going?”

  He shrugged. “Somewhere. I think it’s time I looked around in some old places.” The warhorse lurched up the tor’s heathery slope.

  “I suppose I’m one of them?” Sena said. “Your old places?”

  “Old friends,” he corrected. “First we try to hide our relationship, now the verbal sparring. Are we going to do acrostics next?”

  “Mmm—” Her lips were warm against his neck.

  Caliph’s horse worked into a canter, claws gouging the ground beneath them. The rhythm reminded Sena of the night before.

  They rode up a tor and down through some boggy runoff below the mountains. Then up again into steeper foothills. Both of them had to duck their heads as Caliph guided the animal under venerable trees and onto an overgrown road.

  “Are we going home?” Sena asked.

  Caliph nodded.

  Up ahead, a mansion loomed out of the elms and maples. Its towers disappeared as the horse took them through a tunnel of rustling branches. The towers reappeared when the tunnel opened before an imposing house built more like a fortress. It smelled like the woods. Pollen. Spores. Warm damp greenery and rot.

  The great sweep of lawn tossed waist-deep grass, weeds mostly. Everything gone to seed. Ivy had taken over the structure. The chimneys looked like strange leafy sentinels standing in a row.

  “Has a little character, does it?” Sena said. The blank windowpanes screamed at her. Several had avoided the vine’s complete strangulation. She watched a white squirrel run along a sill gripping a nut in its mouth.

  “Just like I left it,” Caliph joked. He urged the warhorse into the clearing that had once been his front lawn.

  Sena looked back over one shoulder then the other, trying to see a series of large statues set around the edge of the estate. They were enslaved by vines, nearly unrecognizable amid the trees. One seemed to be a seraphic form holding a broken sword, weeping green lines down cracks in her face.

  “Where do they lead?” She pointed to the right at a few white traces of stone that led deeper into the woods.

  Caliph felt an unsettling wash of memory.

  “Family graveyard.” He dismounted and, as he tethered the horse to some unruly bushes by the front steps, his boot hit something fragile, a cracked earthen bowl stained with the stuff of his nightmares.

  He stepped over it, went up the steps. The fortresslike doors, bound in black iron, sprayed intricate metalwork before his eyes. The hinges depicted dead-eyed deer, wolves and wild pigs. They looked ready to take the hand of anyone brazen enough to reach for the knocker.

  Sena stood in the weeds, looking up at the windows with rapt fascination. Spectral towers and hooded gables reached up, conjured pictures of Caliph as a brown-haired boy staring out from the panes. There were departures from normal geometry in the spires and turrets. Sena recognized anomalous angles, unsettling yet subtle differences in the thrust of the eves.

  Obviously, when the great necromancer had moved in, he had altered the architecture slightly to accommodate his profession, changing space to enhance the dimensions on which his many windows looked. It was a marvelous achievement, one that Sena had tried to accomplish in her own cottage.

  “Come on,” Caliph called from the top of the steps.

  The spires seemed to bleed into the sky.

  The doors’ lock had been long broken and Caliph pushed them open, revealing an empty foyer with a grand staircase and rotting paneled walls. Leaves and animal droppings littered the floor. Something that had been chewing on the timbers above the ceiling stopped its noise.

  Sena sniffed the wet air. “It’s like the trees have come inside,” she said, “guests to a long-expired party.” A sapling grew through the floor of the pantry. It reached for a sunlit hole in the ceiling. She watched Caliph’s eyes roam the shapes of the empty alcoves and broken banister.

  “The estate was auctioned off to nobles to put me through school after my uncle died. I’m not sure what happened to it since then.”

  He took one step up the stairs and stopped. “Funny. I don’t feel like being here anymore.”

  Sena glanced through wide doorways to the right and left. To the right, mildewed plaster sagged precariously from the kitchen ceiling. Much of it had fallen to the floor by the hearth, crumbling to its raw ingredients of lime and sand.

  To the left, spider-infested dining halls, parlors and rooms without discernable use burrowed away under great beams and blocks of stone.

  “Why did you come back then?”

  Caliph printed his name in the dust.

  “It seemed like I dreamt it. I wanted to come back, you know? See if it was real. I guess I wanted to show it to you. Nothing from my childhood seems real anymore.” He chuckled. “I had this imaginary friend. Marco.” His voice grew thick and slow.

  “He talked to me at night, told me stories of kings and war and death. Always death.” Caliph nodded outside. “He lived in the graveyard.”

  Sena’s face showed a curious mix of sympathy and morbid fascination.

  “Then I found out he was real.”

  “Real?”

  “My uncle was an extraordinary holomorph.” Caliph rubbed dust from his fingertips.

  His childhood had consisted of this house, his uncle and the few servants on staff. When he looked around, fragmentary images of Cameron, the dream-man, strode through the cankered passageways and grim parlors.

  As usual, the memories were muddy. He knew that the family had chased his rogue of a father off, and that his mother had remained here with her parents.

  Then came the unfortunate dinner, an event he had no recollection of. And after that, or so he had been told, his uncle had come out of the south, claiming both the estate and Caliph: a diaper-wearing toddler.

  He knew the house must have changed with his uncle’s arrival. There must have been a time when the banisters were polished to a golden sheen and bright-colored rugs and vases gleamed in the light of the tall mullioned windows flung open to the sun. But Caliph could not remember such a time or any time when this huge hollow house had been decorated in anything other than black tapestries with strange designs and dark woods imported at tremendous cost from jungles in the south.

  One autumn, Cameron had walked out of the woods and come to live with them. It felt bizarre now. Where had Cameron come from? Why had Caliph’s uncle taken him in? Caliph remembered the kites and the toys that Cameron had carved on this wide stretch of lawn. With Cameron in the house, the nights seemed less dark and the shadows that moved without caster shrank slightly.

  But then Caliph’s memory fumbled. Cameron had left. There had been a long journey in the middle of winter and Nathaniel had locked the house on the hill as if never to return. After that had come the white marble floors and the blood and Cameron’s voice as the two of them descended that long rope into darkness.

  After the darkness, he had no memory whatsoever until, like walking through a doorway into a brightly lit room, he realized that Nathaniel was dead. Cameron had searched for and found Caliph’s father. With Jacob and Caliph’s reunion, Cameron had disolved into the north and never returned.

  Jacob took Caliph to Candleshine, a crowded modest borough that pressed Isca’s southwest wall.

  He had done the best he could but he was never prepared to be a father. He did not have the tools or the experience. He put Caliph in a local school run by the Sisters of the Second Moon and brought him home on weekends to continue where Cameron had left off—teaching him how to wield a sword.

  “We should go. I feel like an idiot out here. I’m supposed to be a king managing a war.”

  “Wait.” Sena sat down by him on the stairs and struggled free from her pack. “I have something to show you.”

  Her supple fingers loosened the buckle and pushed past a change o
f clothes, her diary and a few other odds and ends. Deep at the bottom she gripped the cold soft skin of the Csrym T and hauled it up into the light.

  Caliph stared at it in shock. His hand touched the filthy crimson leather then drew back as though bitten.

  “Where did you get that?”

  Sena set it on her knees. “It turned up in an old bookshop.”

  “This is the book?” Caliph whispered in disbelief. “The one you talked about?”

  “The one I told you about in the attic before I left Desdae.” She nodded.

  Caliph stood up, stunned.

  “This was my uncle’s book!”

  “I know.”

  It was a long time before Caliph spoke. “So . . . you were after me for that?”

  “What?” She scowled.

  “What do you mean, what? Obviously you knew. What now? Interrogate me, find answers about my uncle you couldn’t find anywhere else?” He took a step away.

  Sena’s face felt like it was burning. “What are you talking about? You think you’re the only one who can open your uncle’s book? You know what your problem is? You think everyone is out to get Caliph Howl and you think you have everyone under your thumb. No one crosses Caliph Howl,” she mocked, “or he crawls away to get even.”

  It was the half-truth that made it sting. But Caliph saw beneath her anger. He could read the desperation behind her attack, recognized it in the way her eyes almost trembled at the very tops of her cheekbones.

  He raised his hand and looked away, speaking in slow distinct syllables. “You. Do. Not. Love me.”

  “I don’t love you? Where in Felldin’s Grace did that come from?” She picked up the Csrym T and stuffed it in her pack. “I’ve never heard the words come out of your mouth.” She stood up, preparing to leave.

  “And why should they have come out of my mouth?” Caliph shouted with a voice of indescribable fury. “You want me to admit what a fool I am?”

  The sound so surprised her that she almost sat down.

  Caliph’s unfettered anger, while shocking, teased her sense of play.

  “I am sitting in my past talking about ghosts while my country is at war!” he roared. He turned and kicked the door so fiercely the antique hinges at the bottom gave way. It sagged inward with a groan, threatening to fall on him.

  Caliph jumped back in surprise.

  Though partly appalled by his temper, the mysterious tantrum caused an emotion to flicker through Sena’s stomach that, while she could not name it, made her smile. Maybe it was because she had tried so many times at school to make him angry on purpose, to see how he would behave, and this was a kind of belated conquest.

  When she finally spoke, her voice had attenuated. She used a quieter, more sincere tone than she had ever used with him before.

  “I’m not the one who brought us up here to wallow in the past.”

  His black eyes whirled around and locked on hers.

  “I didn’t come to Stonehold to use you like a stick for the fire either,” she continued. “No. I don’t love you, but if it makes you feel any better this is the closest thing to love that I’ve ever had.”

  “Wonderful. Terrific . . .” His voice trailed off.

  Outside, the warhorse gnashed its teeth and snapped half a dozen tails at flies, oblivious to the difficulties its riders were having. Caliph cleared his throat. “I didn’t mean to yell.”

  Sena’s lips curled with sly humor.

  “In two years I never saw you get that excited—I mean not like that.”

  He ignored her and gestured to the Csrym T now hidden in her pack.

  “Why did you want to show it to me? You can’t open it?” In her anger she had given her secret away.

  “I said—” she began.

  “You said, ‘You think you’re the only one who can open your uncle’s book?’ So what? What kind of book is it?”

  Sena bit back on the argumentative words that instantly came to mind and replied guardedly, “No one really knows—except maybe your uncle and he’s out back talking with tree roots.”

  CHAPTER 17

  When it came to his uncle’s book, Caliph averted his thoughts as much as possible. It had popped out of Sena’s pack like a horrible toy, but that was in the past now. It was just a book. Nothing more. He felt foolish for having gotten so angry over it.

  He took Sena back to the castle and introduced her to the staff. He made it clear she was to be extended the same entitlements he himself received. Although he stopped short of formally labeling or defining their relationship, the staff had experience in this sort of thing. They didn’t ask maladroit or indelicate questions.

  Instead, Gadriel enlisted a squadron of tailors. They descended on her with compliments and measuring tapes and imaginations vivid with her enviable body italicized in cloth. Armed with cropping blades, they threw themselves into piles of luxurious fabric, bolting out lavish styles that swelled ten wardrobes nearly overnight.

  Caliph stood in awe as the castle adjusted like a calculating machine.

  Several astute personages in uniform took frenzied notes on little pads of paper as they pried information out of Sena. What were her favorite authors? Colors? Musical tastes? And so on.

  Did she like fur, leather, diamonds, gold or silver? Did she color her hair? Did she eat meat? Did she bathe in the morning or at night or both or several times a day?

  Feminine articles materialized from inscrutable locations. Perfumes and mirrors danced in glittering array. Bouquets and extra toilet tissue unfolded in the water closet on the fourth floor. Huge men hauled additional furnishings out of every direction. Chiffoniers and towel racks and folding screens. Soaps and creams and porcelain fixtures with floral designs.

  It happened at remarkable speed, like a theater crew changing props until Caliph felt certain the whole event must have somehow been anticipated, prepared for and orchestrated on cue.

  He could tell that Sena was dumbfounded. She looked at him with a sudden vague comprehension of the myriad resources at his command.

  For a moment the old question nagged him, bothersome but easily dismissed. Why she was with him was a riddle he probably didn’t want solved anyway. But then, pondering his own unarticulated feelings for her was only slightly less daunting.

  Not so long ago, he had thought up all kinds of elaborate lachrymose metaphors to describe their relationship. But the truth was simple. She was his bag of qaam-dihet. And he was like any of the old men in ruinous plaster dens along the sea, fingers clenched protectively over the instruments of addiction, choosing to ignore the inevitable.

  With Sena, he thought, it was as if someone had created her to bait him. As though his every impulse had been known to her builder. He comforted himself with the mean-spirited detail that even though his heart ached, even though he had stumbled through the Highlands of Tue in search of her, one fact remained.

  She had come to him.

  Regardless of motive, that single truth assuaged his ego.

  Later in the afternoon, Caliph left her in Gadriel’s care and followed another of the castle stewards toward an unscheduled but urgent meeting with Mr. Vhortghast.

  The spymaster had arrived from the field with intelligence and he met Caliph on the zeppelin deck of the castle’s vast east side. A gray lion, fully outfitted for war, menaced the platform, tethered to a sixteen-story mooring mast and anchored to the coupling in the middle of the deck.

  Mr. Vhortghast waited at a metal railing, looking out at the gray snarled sky over Ironside while men in black uniforms scurried in the background. Caliph joined him.

  A flock of birds took flight with a mournful chyrme, twisting in a helix like gnats over Temple Hill.

  “Fifteenth of Dusk, Psh. A zeppelin goes down in Nifol. Probably bandits. They miss a set of sensitive schematics. Blueprints. Manuals on solvitriol power etcetera. Pandragor technically owns them but recovery teams find them missing from the wreckage. Do you know anything about it?”

  St
artled by the question given almost without preamble, Caliph pawed nervously at his chin.

  “By your tone I take it something’s happened?”

  Vhortghast shrugged. “Not yet. I’ve got some men on it. We know emissaries from Pandragor showed up in Skellum, if you can believe that . . . at parliament. I don’t like the thought of the Pandragonians cutting deals with Shrdnae Witches.”

  “Why are you asking if I know anything about it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Vhortghast. His lips seemed afraid of the hideous gray teeth beneath them, peeling back and exposing them to view. His pasty, fictile expression was unreadable. “I’m sure you have other employees that give you information.”

  Caliph didn’t. Not this kind of information. He wondered if he should.

  Vhortghast clenched the railing with both hands and watched birds cavort through plumes of smoke.

  “There’ve been some strange occurrences in the city. Unexplained . . . holomorphic . . . kinds of crimes. All the Shrdnae agents that we know about—that’s only two by the way—that we’ve been watching . . . have disappeared.”

  “And you think it’s related to the blueprints?”

  “No. My first guess would be that it has to do with the war. The Witchocracy is pulling agents out of harm’s way.”

  “Out of harm’s way? Isn’t it their job to be in harm’s way?”

  “Not these. The agents we were watching were what the Witchocracy calls half-sisters. Who knows? They might even have been decoys. We never even interrogated them.”

  “Then I’m not following you. What does this have to do with the blueprints?”

  “Maybe something. Maybe nothing. But a Pandragonian official, no name, you know how it goes, claims they traced the blueprints here.” Zane fixed Caliph with a piercing stare.

  Caliph’s throat thickened.

  “So I thought I’d ask,” the spymaster’s tone was the closest thing to friendly banter Caliph could imagine, “if you’d heard anything about it.”