The Last Page

by Anthony Huso

  Green chemiostatic torch beams cut the dark. Tall man-things lurched from crevices in the architecture of the castle, hopelessly outnumbered. They went down under the merciless onslaught of dozens of men.

  Trumpets blared. The parapets swelled with running soldiers. Archers with gas-powered crossbows riddled indistinct fleeing forms with enough bolts to add many pounds of weight.

  The corpses of the enemy landed in ponderous piles of ruination, splashing into fountains and beds of blue petunias.

  Caliph headed downstairs and back out to the courtyard in an effort to help.

  The powerful beams of the magnesium lights on the zeppelin deck were turned down into the east gardens. All the gas lamps on the castle grounds burst into hissing blossoms of life.

  Suddenly, an army had appeared. They ransacked every shadow, pitiless and angry.

  Search parties were organized. Staff sergeants barked commands to their squads. Out came the knights.

  They had taken time enough to put their armor on. They stalked into the yard, hackles up, seized chemical torches from the hands of confused and sleepy servants and conducted grumpy solitary investigations of the castle grounds.

  They asked statistical questions while they rummaged in bushes and flower beds. “Who fucked this up?” “How many dead?” “How many expectants?”

  Groups of guards followed in their wake, feeling virtually invulnerable.

  A man-thing made the mistake of leaping out at one knight who then proceeded to blast the creature with a chemiostatic flail the heavy spiked ball of which, being tipped with beryllium, delivered an awesome blaze of light as it turned the creature’s skin to ash with a jolting explosion of electricity. The knight stepped on the creature’s twitching body and walked on.

  It took less than four hours to completely scour the castle and the grounds. Altogether, the sentries and knights found and dispatched thirty-seven intruders, half of which were noticeably more human than the tall thin creatures with the slippery skin.

  They laid them out in the south bailey in a long row. The losses to the castle garrison unfortunately surpassed those of the enemy.

  Forty-two soldiers had been killed. Mostly by strangulation and mostly by surprise. Caliph got word while he was in the south bailey that Sena was safe but (for reasons lost in the relay of information) utterly inconsolable. He would go to her soon. For now, the fact that she was safe was enough.

  They had turned off the magnesium lights after the grounds had been declared clean but Caliph decided to make one last circuit of the gardens before going inside. While men began tossing bodies in the beds of steam wagons and making trips to the gate, Caliph walked into the darkened easterly courtyard.

  He wasn’t really looking for foes. He was simply trying to sort out the madness of the evening.

  Who or what were these gruesome creatures? How had they gotten inside the castle grounds? What had they come searching for?

  He turned off the path, brooding over the unanswerable questions. He had told his men to haul the bodies to West Gate for autopsy by government physicians first thing tomorrow morning. He wanted to know, from a dissector’s point of view, everything there was to know about their physiology.

  As he walked along the courtyard wall he noticed a sudden movement in the dark. His heart froze. He opened his mouth to yell for help, but stopped when he realized the figure was not tall and thin but bulky like a bear on its hind legs. Nor did the figure appear intent on escape. Rather it picked its way carefully across the garden, glancing furtively over its meaty shoulders.

  Apparently it had not seen Caliph. Caliph stopped, fearful to watch, fearful to look away.

  The figure held a key in its hand, the key that had unlocked the double grated entrance to the sewers under the mulberry shrubs.

  The figure fumbled, glancing around as it bent to secure the portals it must have opened earlier that day—the portal through which Caliph realized the enemies must have come.

  Caliph flattened himself against the courtyard wall, breathing slow and quiet. He heard the key turn in the lock, leaves rustle. After another moment, the figure appeared on the courtyard path, still nervous, smoothing down its clothing, checking over its shoulder time and again.

  It headed for the torch-lit archway beside which Caliph was pressed. Caliph held his breath.

  As it walked, the figure’s fretful manner dissipated quickly. It whistled, thrusting its hands into deep pockets, moving into the cone of light.

  Caliph gasped. It was all he could do to stay silent and hidden as the traitor, whose face was plainly visible, strode smugly toward the castle entrance, confident his actions had gone unobserved.

  After the footsteps had echoed into silence, Caliph waited another five minutes before moving.

  Finally, muscles aching with tension and stress brought on by heartbroken disbelief, he crept counterclockwise through the courtyards, stealing through the tumid darkness with fumbling uncertain steps, taking pains to approach the castle doors from a direction seemingly disconnected with the place and moment of the crime.

  CHAPTER 21

  Caliph sat in the dark of his bedroom despising David Thacker. He still couldn’t choke it down, that his old friend from Desdae had sold him out. His anger was rogue, displaced, confused. Had he done something to earn this perfidious crime? Could he have somehow slighted the quiet writer who studied composition and novels and diverse fields of criticism? Had he made some trespass against David that his own calluses made invisible?

  He thought back to their afternoon in Grume’s, where they had seemingly drunk to the camaraderie between them. Had it all been a façade? Had there ever been any true friendship at all?

  Caliph had no answers. All he had were questions and the feeling that reality had somehow changed for him more drastically than any holomorph could ever manage with all the holojoules in the world.

  One thing was certain. David Thacker had plans of his own.

  Caliph had returned from the courtyard to find Sena soulsick and wretched. She equivocated on telling him the reason but eventually it came out that her book, Caliph’s uncle’s book, had disappeared.

  Caliph repressed an intransigent impulse to scold her. He paused and his face tightened. He wanted to shout that soldiers had died tonight—a great many men and women had died tonight and would not be going home to their families, to their friends. He wanted to rouse her, tell her it was common sense that people’s lives were far more important than any book. He wanted to ask her where her head was at, that all she could think about was some worm-eaten incunabulum.

  Instead, his face relaxed. “Are you sure it’s missing?”

  “Of course I’m sure.” Sena looked insulted.

  “Let’s have a look.”

  Sena sighed. She followed him to the fourth floor. With the gas lamps on, the room looked even worse than it had in the dark. Investigators from the watch had come and gone.

  They had jotted down clues before letting the servants in to clean. The dead guards had been wrapped up and taken away. All that was left was to sort through the jumble of annihilated objects.

  Wheeled bins of feathers (some white, some red and sticky) mingled with splintered wood and ceramic shards. The bins overflowed, waiting to be carted away while men and women on the night shift sorted through the rubbish.

  Unfortunately, most of it had already been consigned to the trash.

  “Where did you last have it?” asked Caliph.

  “I put it in the rolltop,” said Sena, “right the—”

  Her words died.

  The desk was broken open and emptied but on its top, under the array of tiny useless drawers and slots, below the arced groove that until recently had held the interlocking slats that made its clutter presentably discreet, sat the red book.

  Sena’s stomach flipped, then twisted like a wrung-out rag.

  “Looks like it’s here,” Caliph deadpanned. “Maybe you missed it?”

  Sena mumbled som
ething barely intelligible.

  “Yeah. I guess I did.” Her bloodless lips parted in astonishment. But she didn’t believe her own admission. She knew what she had seen even in the dim light.

  Maybe one of the servants had found it under the bed or in a corner and replaced it. But how could they have known where it came from? How could they have known where it belonged?

  She looked around. They were stacking everything worth salvaging in neat piles by the hearth.

  When she asked, they affirmed that none of them had touched it.

  “That’s where it was when I came in,” said a young man.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I guess so. I was the first in after the inspectors left.”

  Somehow the news did not surprise her. She picked it up with nerveless fingers and took it with her as Caliph tugged her from the room.

  They went to one of the guest bedrooms for the night. Caliph couldn’t sleep. He sat on the edge of the mattress in the dark.

  Sena locked the Csrym T in a chest at the foot of the bed. Despite the evening’s events, now that it was safe, she felt almost totally relaxed. She sidled up to him in the dark and wrapped her arms around him from behind. She could feel the heavy hot incubation of his thoughts, the sullen plotting going on inside.

  “What is it?”

  Caliph exhaled: something between a grumble and a sigh. What is it! Are you blind? Isca Castle has been attacked! I’ve been betrayed! People are dead!

  Out loud he said, “Are all . . .” he wanted to put it more delicately but gave up, “Shrdnae Witches trained in . . . subterfuge?”

  Sena held her breath, wondering what he would say next if she answered either way. Finally, she said distinctly, “I am.”

  Caliph let out a sigh of relief. “Then there’s something I want you to do.”

  Sena hung in the blackness of a narrow corridor, wedged against the lofty ceiling. Legs spread. One foot braced on either wall. At five-foot-ten her legs were barely long enough to achieve the feat. She looked down at the tiled floor twelve feet below.

  A gas lamp in a stone recess flooded the bottom half of the passageway in capricious opal light. Her stamina was extraordinary but by the time the sentry finally arrived at the door opposite the gas lamp her legs were quivering.

  Sena watched him knock at the door. He waited, scratched his ass, muttered something she couldn’t make out.

  The door was thick. It muffled any sound from within. Sena bit her lower lip and concentrated on maintaining her position.

  After a few seconds the door opened.

  David Thacker peered out from a dimly lit room. The sight of the sentry discomposed him sufficiently to qualify in Sena’s mind as a confession of guilt. He tried to cover his dismay with a yawn.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” asked David. Sena could tell he was not accustomed to lying.

  “Nothing, sir.” The guard had straightened. “There’s someone at the gates for you. We told them it was after curfew but they insisted. What with the craziness tonight we can’t open the gate. You’ll have to take a boat across the moat. You can meet ’em in the Cracked Agate just across the square.”

  “What?” David was obviously skeptical. “Was it a man or a woman?”

  “Man,” said the guard. “I guess. I wasn’t actually there when they came calling. Just delivering the message, sir. The High King happened to be at the gate, I guess. Said you were a friend and it would be okay.”

  Sena watched terror welter under David’s cheeks, ripple behind his eyes and vanish.

  There was no visitor of course. Caliph had dreamt it up to lure David Thacker away from his room. But by the look on his face, Sena guessed a man that fit the guard’s ambiguous description did in fact exist—a man that might (in David’s mind) have actually come to call.

  “Let me get my cloak.”

  “I guess your visitor said it was urgent,” the guard replied.

  David froze midstep, half in and half out of the room. The fear in his eyes had turned to absolute horror. “Did he?”

  He reached around the corner and pulled a thin summer cloak after him. He put it on quickly and patted himself, checking for essentials. He locked the door and tugged the handle twice before shambling timorously down the hall after the guard.

  Sena waited. Her legs were at the end of their endurance. She listened carefully. Only when she was certain did she snap her legs shut and distill, soundlessly to the tile floor.

  The guards made regular rounds even here among the guest suites that honeycombed the castle’s west wing. She had to work fast.

  Caliph had warned her that David Thacker had been granted a request to change out his lock. He was supposed to have given a copy of the key to Gadriel, which he had never done.

  Sena had already palmed a torsion wrench and two different picks. She set one in her mouth, biting the tang like the stem of a rose while she slipped both the wrench and a snake pick into the keyway.

  As her mind adjusted to the lock, she drew the pick, feeling it pop past the pins. She noted the stiffness of the springs and counted them without applying any torque to the wrench. There were five.

  She began to work.

  When she gave it clockwise torque the lock stopped dead, counterclockwise she felt it mush. She pulled the torsion wrench down ever so slightly.

  It was like fucking, just the right amount of tenderness and force.

  Pin two set first. She heard it rattle, felt it give against the snake. She upped the torque and felt pin three go next. Obviously the holes had not been bored straight.

  There were guards just around the end of the hall. She could see their shadows reaching monstrously from the flicker of a torch. They weren’t talking much and she couldn’t risk scrubbing the lock. They weren’t in on the deception and if they heard, despite her status as the High King’s mistress, it would be a bust.

  Pins four and five went together under the double tips of the snake. Almost there. Pin one came last. Or did it? She tried the wrench. The plug refused to spin.

  “Yella byn.”

  She had false set one of the pairs.

  At the end of the hall the voices picked up. The shadows leapt as the men began to move. Sena’s heart did not skip. Her self-confidence was growing.

  She withdrew her tools from the lock, jumped, jumped again off the wall and in such manner attained a remarkable height. Again her legs spanned the corridor.

  Two sentries stepped chuckling into the intersection thirty feet away. For a moment they glanced down the long empty hallway where David Thacker’s door was one of many.

  To them, the corridor was empty. They stopped for a moment, sharing some coarse anecdote before shuffling on their way.

  Sena dropped from her split position, hidden by perspective against the darkness of the ceiling. Once again, she began to work the lock.

  Pin two crossed the sheer line first. She flicked it with the pick and heard it rattle. Yes. It had set correctly. Pin three went next but different than before. She increased torque and scrubbed. Four, five and one set and the plug turned.

  That is, it turned one-hundred-eighty degrees and stopped. In an amateur mistake, she had forgotten to place the flat of her pick in the bottom of the keyway. Pin three had a spacer. It had dropped out. She traded the snake for the hooked rake in her mouth. Carefully she fished the spacer from the lock, catching it in her palm.

  David’s key was not likely to work when he came back. He would know someone had been in his room. Sena bit her lip in frustration. Oh well, there was nothing for it now but to go on. She turned the wrench, spun the plug, hit three-sixty and the bolt popped back.

  The door opened.

  Papers littered the room beyond. Segments of a novel, bits of poetry and pages from a play scattered across a desk, a bed and the floor.

  A writer, Sena mused. A coiled radiator on one wall could have offered heat from the boilers if the season had been later, but the metal pipes were cold. A w
ardrobe, a desk and a bed did a good job of limiting walking room.

  Sena stepped carefully, making sure she disturbed nothing.

  David had been gone nearly ten minutes now. She checked her pocket watch under its own green glow. Unfortunately she didn’t really know what to look for.

  Caliph had told her what he had seen and how he suspected his old friend from Desdae had let the creatures in from the sewers.

  A key then, thought Sena. That’s where I’ll start.

  She went through the pockets of every garment in the room. Empty.

  There was, however, a locked coffer in the bottom of the wardrobe squatting beside several pairs of shoes. It was padlocked which was good since she had three different skeleton keys that fit most warded locks made in the north. She got it on her first try and flipped the lid.

  Inside were several disturbing things.

  One was a letter.

  Mr. Thacker,

  A writer with vices seems such a stereotypical tragedy. I couldn’t help but notice your name in the Herald as one of several artists come to stay at Isca Castle. Nor could I help noticing your name on the ledger of a truly unsavory bordello in Ghoul Court just the other evening. One should generally use an alias whenever blackmail could be an issue.

  I propose we meet, unless your qaam-dihet habits are something you wouldn’t mind your longtime friend Caliph Howl finding out about.

  Yours truly,

  Peter Lark

  The note had been crumpled as if its owner meant to throw it away and then changed his mind, smoothed it out and tucked it in the box.

  Beside the note was a little brown pouch, a bloody scalpel and a stained sponge. As Sena had supposed, when she checked the pouch several lumps of deep crimson material rolled into her palm. They were vaguely cohesive like brown sugar.