The Last Page

by Anthony Huso

  While their fellows at the opera are bent on putting an end to the Sslî they fear, those at the castle advance relentlessly through the courtyard, searching for the book and putting an end to any sentry in their path.

  Caliph and Sena had gone slack in the aftermath.

  The carriage rumbled past Gilnaroth through Barrow Hill to King’s Road and turned north into the Hold. By the time they reached the castle gate, the terror at the opera house had been replaced with nausea and exhaustion.

  As usual, huge gears began to turn the instant the High King was inside, pulling up the drawbridge, locking the castle down on its island for the night.

  Vhortghast leapt from the back of the carriage before it had fully stopped. Since the metholinate lamps had been shut off, torchlight licked the edges of the vast court where governmental buildings crowded. He opened the door and helped Sena and Caliph clamber out.

  A quad of soldiers crossed the yard heading in formation toward the east gardens. Their leather cuirasses and barbuts glared as facets of the armor turned in unison from the light. Despite their presence, something felt strangely wrong.

  The carriage driver was quick to bid everyone good night. He had not asked what had gone on inside the opera. With a curt tip of the hat, his nervous meaty hands whipped the horses toward the livery.

  Caliph glanced back in the direction of the gates. It was three hundred yards to the drawbridge from the center of the south bailey. He felt strangely isolated.

  A courthouse and a row of statues shone green in the sultry night. Crickets chirped. The last queelub of the season flickered in a stately stand of maples to the west. After dusk, when the visitors had signed out, the small village of governmental edifices became austere and chilly, like monuments in a park. Even with all the night noises, the humidity seemed to stifle sound.

  “Why are the lights out in the kitchen?” asked Caliph. The bank of mullioned panes west of the foyer usually glowed all night.

  The spymaster scowled. “I don’t know.”

  A lone cicada screamed from nearby.

  “Everything is fine,” Caliph soothed.

  Even so, Sena felt her skin prickle.

  Zane led them toward the front door, up a steep staircase, across another miniature drawbridge to the lavish foyer decorated with tile and statuary and lit by gas. Vhortghast rapped. The glazed door was unlocked.

  They stepped inside.

  A short extravagant hallway flickered with amber glass on either wall. Lit by candles in hidden guardrooms, the narrow colorful panes covered arrow slits; the paneled ceiling: murder holes. Isca Castle had not been in danger of siege for so long that its defensive architecture had been concealed with more aesthetically pleasing fixtures.

  At the top of a second staircase, the grand foyer engulfed them like bits of food under domed glass. To the north, the great staircase curled down from the second story, ending at the foot of one of several pillars that framed a series of four lofty arches to the grand hall: a room that currently glowered in darkness. Other doors led to guardrooms, the kitchen and the east wing.

  The silence was interminable. Sena’s thoughts reduced to the book hidden in Caliph’s bedroom. The emotional impact of the orchestrated ambush at the theater and now the empty abandoned corridors of the castle were sinking in, fomenting into panic.

  Vhortghast said something soft and unintelligible, probably because the wrongness of their surroundings was also affecting him.

  “I’m going to have a look,” said Sena.

  Zane hushed her savagely but she ignored him. They had made enough noise coming up the stairs that any unfriendly ears in the nearby rooms would certainly have heard. Caliph looked at her apprehensively.

  “I’ll be fine. Trust me.” She pinched him and slipped away, moving up the stairs.

  Caliph nearly cried out, almost pleaded with her to come back, but he didn’t. The oppressive quiet in the castle seemed to crush his ability to shout.

  Zane had drawn a long knife from his belt. It curved away from his forearm like a claw. He was circuiting the foyer. Checking doors. Peering into various rooms. He let Sena go without a word and Caliph realized suddenly that the spymaster’s only responsibility was to the High King’s safety.

  Caliph swore and headed for the grand hall, determined to turn on some lights.

  “Your majesty—?”

  Caliph didn’t answer. Like at the opera house, he had had enough. He strode into the darkness and immediately fell over a large obstacle. Three bodies lay in a low pile, obscured by the darkness of the archway. Caliph scrambled up, stifling a shriek. His fine suit was smudged with blood. Zane pulled him back, picked up a sword from the fallen guards and handed it to him.

  Caliph’s terror was burning off as his anger mounted. He would find whoever had done this.

  Sena had always lacked confidence in her abilities as a Sister of the Seventh House. Her accelerated ascension and keen awareness of her unfair promotions had resulted in timidity and self-doubt.

  In crisis, she often choked.

  But the dangers she had faced since spring had begun to chip away at her insecurity. She had survived two, possibly three attempts on her life if she counted tonight—though that was a bit premature. She had moved the Csrym T through Skellum under Megan’s nose.

  Her diffidence had begun to crumble.

  Without shoes, without a weapon, she slid from the great staircase into the blackness of the upper hall. To the west, the white marble and tall windows of the grand hall’s second story chilled the air like a solid cube of ointment. Leaf shadows twirled and danced in swaying rhythms across the floor. She headed east toward the High King’s bedroom, up another set of marble stairs.

  When she reached the fourth floor, she had yet to see a guard. A post, flooded with yellow lamplight, revealed a game of cards left in midplay. One chair rested on its side. There were no other signs of struggle. Coins still stood in little stacks or lay in piles indicating ownership and the unclaimed pot. A switchblade had been left beside one man’s winnings. Sena snapped it up in passing and drifted down the lofty passage to the west.

  By now, her evening gown was in shreds. The kick pleat had continued to tear. What few diamonds were left hung from threads. Her movements were fluid, unrestricted.

  The paneled walls marched west.

  Great vases and indistinct statues twisted up in menacing shapes. Dozens of candles petaled the walls with daylily orange while orchid-colored shadows leapt from side tables and potted trees.

  Sena slid below a bank of mullioned palladian glass, keeping to the darkest part of the passageway. Not even twenty feet in front of her, the High King’s bedroom doors hung open. Narrow, ornate and twelve feet tall. Like most doors in the castle, they swung on four hinges: a moving piece of wall.

  A gruesome splatter on the wood paneling beside the doors looked purple in the light from the window, like someone had hurled a bottle of milk at the wall, bursting its contents explosively—only the liquid wasn’t white.

  Sena could smell the faint cloying reek of bungled wetwork. Like a slaughterhouse. The gagging stink of burst entrails.

  At the door she stopped and listened.

  Silence.

  She had just set her muscles in motion, building momentum to dart from the shadow under the window to the shadow of the bedroom, when a tall thin man walked out from the narrow crack of blackness.

  Sena pulled up short and diverted her energy into a spin that planted her shoulder soundlessly against the north wall. Still in shadow, she rested at a forty-five degree angle to the man-thing’s flank.

  The tall creature stretched its fingers and glanced around as though tasting the air. He looked frustrated. One of his hands dribbled gore and his sleeve flapped heavy and red. He must have been seven feet tall. Bone thin. White saggy flesh hung from his neck and hollow deep-set eyes glittered with pink light.

  His clothing was a mess, spattered and crusty with mud and foul-smelling sludge. Parti
ally dried clods of night soil had fractured and fallen away from his pant cuffs, leaving a trail as he walked down the center of the carpeted hall.

  Sena saw an opportunity. She could dart out, slip up behind him, plunge her knife into his kidney, pull it out before he fell, draw it deeply across his throat. She had been trained for this. She had practiced the movements like a dancer in the gymnasium at Skellum.

  But something sat on her instinct to kill. Intuition perhaps.

  She waited.

  A second man emerged from the High King’s bedroom. Equally filthy, equally gaunt and horrifying. His eyes were more orange; more amber, like little nuggets of petrified sap. He too was speckled with blood and sewage. A third and fourth man exited the bedroom. They were shorter and carried weapons. They wore gas masks around their necks like bulky chokers.

  Sena consoled herself on the fact that she had waited. None of them carried bags or packs. None of them carried anything besides the two with broadswords. They looked ridiculous, like people that had been at work and suddenly gone insane, leaving customers at the counter to embark on some blood-soaked impracticality. They looked thoroughly psychotic. Thoroughly deranged.

  None of them carried the Csrym T. Nor could they have hidden it, as big as it was, in their vests or suit coats or tucked it discreetly under an arm.

  If not the book then what? Why would men like those that attacked them at the opera ransack Caliph’s bedroom within the hour?

  Sena drew blood from her palm. She whispered an equation to stanch the wound and used the remaining holojoules to throw a glamour down the hall.

  From the far end, a light glimmered. Her own voice laughed lightly. Echoing. Two indistinct figures passed south around the door frame, shimmery and fumbling. Like inebriated lovers stumbling off to fuck.

  The pack of four men set off at once, headed for the illusion.

  Sena crept around the door and vanished into the bedroom. Despite the jungled darkness, she could tell the entire chamber had been destroyed.

  The mattress was ripped open. Feathery guts disemboweled and scattered over the corpses of what she estimated to be half a dozen castle guards. Formerly magnificent wardrobes were virtually torn apart, broken into as though they had been searched for secret parts.

  Chairs and trunks were splintered. Slashed cushions exuded cotton like tissue dribbling from open wounds. Even the fireplace grate had been uprooted, cast aside and the ashes excavated carelessly as if by an unruly dog.

  Sena turned to the rolltop desk. It had been shattered. Broken ink bottles and papers where distributed without consideration. The drawers were emptied and tossed aside.

  The Csrym T was gone.

  Sena gasped.

  She held her stomach. She looked at the exact place she had left it. Defiantly, as though she could bullwhip reality for misbehaving, she pawed through the nearby refuse. From fast-flowing undercurrents of thought, she drew up a bucket full of aching icy acceptance that she would not find it.

  As the slow realization began to sink in, anger seemed amphigoric. She couldn’t alter what had happened. But what now? How could she get it back?

  Her thoughts leapt to the four men that had left the bedroom just before she came in. She tried to remember clearly. But second-guessing herself was useless. She knew none of them had carried the book.

  She couldn’t think. The Csrym T’s absence filled her mind like a yawning chasm. Years of legwork sifting information, clues, rumors and outright prevarications had been wasted. As if she had been sculpting a masterpiece for the past four and a half years and some vandal had come along with a sledge.

  Sena couldn’t breathe.

  She sank down amid the ruined room, stunned.

  I have to leave, she thought. I have to follow the men. Nothing else made sense. There was nothing else to do.

  She jumped up and bolted from the room, sprinting down the center of the hall, sticking to the narrow strip of carpet that swallowed up the beating of her feet.

  She hadn’t even grabbed a pair of boots. She had no time. The men had already disappeared.

  Caliph heard the sound of fighting. It echoed strangely through wood and marble halls, faint shouts that hinted at profound urgency. The clang of ringing steel like a bell. He did not wait for Zane.

  He tore off down the hall, sword in hand, looking for a place to stick his boiling rage.

  As he ran, the sound grew louder. He could hear yelps and cries and strange inhuman grunts. After turning several corners left and right he barreled directly into the fray.

  He had come up behind the enemy. A group of guards to the west held their ground against a trio of tall thin men nearly identical to those Caliph had seen at the opera. The guards were cut off. They faced the man-things head-on, sword to hand. They saw Caliph appear on the far side but they couldn’t reach him.

  Caliph sailed into battle. He had arrived with such velocity that his presence went unnoticed until he had already run one through. The broadsword Zane had handed him slotted neatly into the center of the creature’s back, made its legs to go pliant.

  Caliph drove the sword out through the belly and wrenched it back, pulling it from the terrible wound before the creature fell sprawling to the floor, its spinal cord severed.

  Caliph turned and set upon another savagely. His sword struck the rib cage but seemed to glance as if from glassy steel, turning the sword in his hand and nearly forcing it from his grasp. His recovery was awkward and slow.

  The men, cowering and nearly beaten, rallied. They rushed forward, taking advantage of the hole Caliph had created in the enemy line. For a moment, the man-things thrashed and floundered as the soldiers surrounded them.

  But the thing on the floor was still crawling, pulling its useless legs behind. It reached out huge hands and pulled one guard’s feet out from under him.

  The ghastly mouth opened to reveal a picket fence of yellow teeth. It bit ruthlessly through the guardsman’s leather, eliciting a scream.

  Caliph lost his footing as the half-paralyzed creature lurched around the floor. He reeled backward, crashing into the west wall and heading for the carpet.

  Blades were glittering with their own vibrations as they struck and glanced off the strangely deflective hides. The creatures’ clothing had been hacked away. Ragged and snarling they endured a hail of blows.

  The guards hewed with all their fury but only one stroke in three drew blood.

  Caliph looked up to see one guard’s sword turn aside so abruptly that it struck another guard and cut him deeply on the upswing. It chopped through his pectoral muscle, up into his armpit, deep enough to sever the subclavian. The man screamed as a fountain of red burst from his arm, an unstoppable rhythmic torrent.

  Another blow landed on the man-thing’s hide and Caliph watched again in horror as the strange mechanism of its armor swept the stroke aside.

  It was miraculous to see all the strength and momentum of the guard, focused in a falling edge of steel. It bore down on the creature’s unprotected flesh, intent on parting skin from bone. But the thin tissue did not resist. It gave to the blow like limp sausage casings filled with barely enough water to make them buttery along internal surfaces. As though fluid rather than muscle lurked just below the epidermis. The skin sank and traveled in a ripple along the bone.

  The force carried laterally, following the length of the creature’s arm. When the sword had moved a foot or more along the skeletal frame of the monster it must have met the smooth ramp of an inhuman condyle like a toboggan going off a jump. The weapon went flying back out harmlessly into space. Caliph sat where he had fallen, stunned.

  His fascination was broken by the thing on the floor flinging itself around on powerful arms. It was trying to attack him.

  Caliph snarled and adjusted to his new understanding of the creature’s anatomy. He stabbed instead of slashed. The sharp point punctured the creature’s chest, darting between ribs, deep into a lung. The thing gasped and recoiled.


  “Stab them!”

  His men, grappling with faint understanding, obeyed. They brought one to its knees almost immediately with concerted thrusts.

  Zane Vhortghast had finally appeared. In actuality, he was less than twenty seconds on the High King’s heels but much had happened in the intervening moments of melee.

  He fell on the back of one of the creatures, driving his knife down with anatomically educated precision. Despite the violent thrashing of the creature he managed to bury the weapon in the thing’s heart on his second attempt.

  There was one left. Caliph met its eyes and pulled his sword across his own hand, using his blood to power something raw and brutal he had heard long ago in his uncle’s house. The Unknown Tongue gurgled in Caliph’s throat as the monster fell toward him, murderous fingers spread.

  The creature hit Caliph with force. It plowed into the High King and sent him sliding back across the marble floor, skidding on guardsman’s blood. His men looked on in horror, certain that the creature’s fingers had torn through Caliph’s body like steel cables.

  Slowly, friction took hold in the stiffening smear of gore and the two bodies agglutinated, coming to a viscid stop.

  Everything was still. The creature moved slightly but very strangely as though something were inside it. A bulge moved around like a large mole burrowing just below its skin. With shock, the bewildered guards realized it was Caliph’s fist, pushing up from below as against a flimsy membrane.

  The creature gave a gurgling scream and seemed to roll sideways like a bag of jelly, slipping off Caliph to flatten against the floor.

  Caliph stood up and stabbed it with his sword. The sack of skin popped with a liquescent slurp. The sudden abruption of tissue spilled a tide of gray-and-red fluid out from the amoeba-like blob, issuing liquefied bones and body fluids all across the ghastly floor.

  Zane wiped his blade off and looked around, barking orders to whoever was still alive. Outside, alarm bells were finally ringing, calling scores of sleeping guards into the fray.

  Lights blazed in the south bailey. Caliph stood up, slightly stunned. His formula wasn’t supposed to do that. Something had gone wrong with the math. New sounds turned his attention from the holomorphic aberration. He didn’t have time to think about mutated spells. Glancing out a window he could see hordes of armed men pouring from virtually every direction. Some were still pulling on armor.