The Last Page

by Anthony Huso

  “So he sold the plans,” said Caliph.

  “Unbelievable.”

  “The Pandragonians know,” Caliph said. “They know and I bet they now have proof that we have access to solvitriol power.”

  “Ideas who the buyer was?”

  Caliph stood up.

  “Yeah. I’ll see you in a couple days.”

  When Caliph returned from Glôssok and touched down on the glowing zeppelin deck, Ns was already dying.

  He saw the poor cat from across the vast expanse of concrete, lying on its side, the hazy whirring shape of a glimbender hovering over it. He ran, tried to chase it away, but the thing had already ejaculated its larva deep into Ns’ brain.

  By the time Caliph crossed the deck, the furtive hairy eye on wings had gone, darting into the night.

  Ns lay breathing quietly, his life force winding down as the hungry slugs squirmed inside his skull.

  Rolling in a bath of their own digestive acids, the glimbender grubs would make short work of their host. After they’d eaten the cat’s brain they would spin silken cocoons inside the cranium, gestating for a month or more while the fur and skin moldered away. When they hatched, they’d come fumbling out of eye sockets or through the jaw.

  There was nothing to be done.

  Caliph called for Gadriel who summoned Sena to the deck. When she arrived, she wept and paced and stroked her dying pet.

  Caliph tried to comfort her but she was inconsolable. Gadriel knelt with a tin of tissues at the ready.

  Slowly, Ns’ breathing thinned out and settled into strange seizure-like quivers that served no respiratory function.

  At last the animal stilled.

  A wire seemed to burst in Sena’s brain, like a violin string popping at a concert. She reeled as from a blow, crumpled to the deck and into a deep lethargic swoon from which neither salts nor shouts could rouse her.

  Caliph carried her to their bedroom and summoned the physicians. They came, hooded and robed in red, carrying bowls and scalpels and hypodermics made of glass. They checked her breathing.

  They tried ammonium carbonate mixed with perfume for the third time—risking poisoning. They tried cool rags and gentle slaps about the face. Finally they gave up.

  “She’s breathing. There’s not much else I can say.”

  One of the physicians drew an ampoule of amber fluid from his robes. He filled the barrel of his syringe and pressed the plunger, adjusting the fluid to the level of several units etched in glass.

  “This is a mild stimulant that should work during the course of the night.”

  He slipped one and a half inches of twenty-gauge steel into the flesh of her shoulder. After he withdrew, he taped a cotton ball over the red pearl that blossomed on her skin and motioned for the others to leave the room.

  “Have her watched. Keep her warm. If her breathing becomes irregular, or she doesn’t wake in the morning, call me back. Call me back either way and I’ll do a checkup, make sure everything’s ticky.”

  Caliph nodded and the physician left.

  Once he had gone, Caliph covered Sena with a comforter. Servants issued into the room. They brought coffee.

  “I’ll take loring tea,” said Caliph, “with cream.”

  The servants glanced at each other awkwardly until Gadriel pushed to the front. He looked as if he meant to protect them from something. The seneschal straightened his collar and forced a smile. “Unfortunately we’re out of loring tea, your majesty. But I do have several . . . northern roasts here . . . to choose from.” He bit his lip. “Perhaps you wouldn’t mind sampling some of our local finest . . .”

  It hit Caliph in the face that Saergaeth had blocked lines of import to the Duchy. They were cut off from the south . . . from the rest of the world. Caliph swallowed the fact slowly and then chuckled. “Of course. Loring tea isn’t what I need tonight anyway. Brew me a strong cup, any one you want. I’ll try them all.” He clamped Gadriel on the shoulder and walked over to the bed, where he listened anxiously to Sena’s breathing.

  When the second hour bells tolled mournfully from Hullmallow Cathedral four miles away, Caliph summoned Mr. Vhortghast to the chamber.

  Sena’s breathing was regular and deep as the spymaster entered. Caliph felt annoyed that Zane never looked disheveled or tired or disoriented even in the middle of the night.

  The spymaster wore black tweed and a purple ascot that made his clay-like complexion absolutely livid.

  “I want you to find Peter Lark,” said Caliph.

  “David Thacker knew virtually nothing about him, my lord.”

  Caliph started to raise his voice then quickly controlled himself. “I don’t give a—I don’t care. Find him.”

  “I’ll put some men on it. What’s the sudden interest?” Dark glints of metal flashed from the spymaster’s dove-gray teeth.

  “Mine,” said Caliph. “My personal interest.”

  “Of course. I’m sure we can turn something up before long.”

  Mr. Vhortghast left.

  All Caliph could think about besides Sena’s health was the second set of blueprints, David’s stack of gold and the note from Peter Lark.

  Around three in the morning one of the maids encouraged him to go to bed. She said she would take over. Caliph thanked her kindly before banishing her from the room. He paced the marble floor beneath the fresco in the ceiling, glancing at Sena’s face and the stripe of bright blue she had put into her hair.

  His head was full. Saergaeth’s stranglehold on Isca seemed complete. He would wait a little while; starve the seat of government; terrorize them; ensure morale was at an all-time low. And then Saergaeth would come south, across the moors, riding the winds in a zeppelin army vast enough to darken the sky. “When the leaves fall. When the snow flies,” assured Yrisl, “he will be coming.”

  Caliph envisioned the rain of chemical bombs and steel harpoons and cannonballs made of stone. Even with Sigmund’s brilliant mind . . . even if we can get a solvitriol bomb to work . . . we haven’t got a method of delivery . . . we haven’t even got time to test a soul-bomb’s success.

  He pondered the dangers of widespread disruption.

  What if the ripple effect Sigmund described traveled beyond the desired range? What if my own troops fall victim to a solvitriol bomb?

  CHAPTER 25

  Sena awoke in a sour mood. Her head hurt. Her familiar was dead. Light from the western fields splayed through tall windows with the dawn hovering, gray and pink above the bed.

  Caliph had fallen asleep in a chair. She touched his dark curls with faint affection but he did not stir.

  Unaware of the agonizing watch he had maintained, she slid from the sheets and went to find the place they had buried Ns.

  She found Gadriel first in the grand hall dusting trophies amid shafts of light. He mentioned the start she had given the entire castle. After a semi-tense conversation she followed his directions to the place the gardener had set her cat on fire. A carefully raked pile and a ceramic jar in the north garden bespoke the ceremony that had gone into the immolation.

  Obviously the animal’s relationship to her had occasioned this strange effort at decorum. She understood it had to be done, of course. Fire was the best way to guarantee destruction of the glimbender larvae.

  Sena looked on the jar with faint stirrings of emotion that ranged all the way from parallels to her mother’s fiery end to whether the cat had ever truly liked her.

  She wasn’t heartbroken. Her hysteria the night before hadn’t been about endearment. She was saddened, but not as saddened as she had been frightened of the inscrutable repercussions the cat’s death might have on her mind.

  As her familiar, the animal had allowed her additional noetic space to calculate holomorphic formulae. Although she hadn’t often used the extra processing power of the creature’s brain, the pain that gashed the soft tissues inside her skull was deep and real the instant Ns had died.

  Ever since getting up this morning she had been unable
to suppress the repetitive urge to touch her forehead and examine her fingertips for blood. Of course there was none. Her wound was internal.

  Maybe I’ll be fine, she thought. Maybe with the exception of last night, everything will be fine.

  Sena left the city.

  The moment she did, a strange sense of relief enveloped her. She took her sickle knife, her pocket watch, a bottle of water and her empty pack. Beyond Isca’s soot-fouled walls the reach of machines fell abruptly short, amputated by the Duchy’s green mélange.

  She was free of the grinding gears, beyond the black vomit of urban architecture. And the war front was still over fifty miles away. People were trickling away, burping cars loaded with personal belongings, headed for the Fort Line and safety.

  Beyond West Fen the road turned to clay, hedged with thickets and sloughs. Marshy ditches, resonant with biting insects and glutted with sludge as thick as cow sprue, instigated clutches of weeds that spread their hot-sweet smell along the road.

  She passed cottages where people shot up like ancient gnarled stumps from benches in the shade. Their fists clutched newspapers from the city in grips familiar with loss. There were children. Babies crying and raucous games in the grass. Everyone capable of hard labor had melted with the morning into acres of corn or barely or rye.

  Sena relaxed as she walked. She thought about Nathaniel Howl. Ever since Cameron’s arrival she had been collecting stories. The old man fascinated her for reasons beyond his connection with the book.

  She had jotted down a few of the anecdotes Cameron and Caliph had discussed, the ones that truly unnerved her, like the time Nathaniel had taken it upon himself to explain sex to his six-year-old nephew.

  “His fingers were so thin,” Caliph had said. “They did this slow together-apart, together-apart motion that interlaced with a whispery sound as the knuckles brushed against each other. He eased back in his rocking chair and said, ‘Caliph, men and women are like honey and muffins. Put the honey on . . . it melts right inside the muffin. Love is like that. Sweet and warm and sticky. It’s hard to get off because it gets inside.’

  “Then he gave me a hand-illustrated book, inked in red and blue and skin-pink . . . mostly skin-pink. He patted my head and said, ‘Love is a good thing, Caliph. It’s what even old men like me want.’ ”

  Sena envisioned Caliph poring over love positions by age six. She couldn’t tell if her affection for him was growing. She tried to convince herself that it was. Mostly she just felt sorry for his childhood.

  Nathaniel’s character conjured vivid crazy images in her head, roaming the halls of the House on Isca Hill as Cameron described, marking up the frosted windowpanes with designs he drew with his fingertip. “Ha, that’s a little blossom, yes it is. Little frost rose on the window. Cold, cold.” He rubbed his hands. “Lovely little flowers everywhere.” She could hear him in her head, babbling.

  She continued along the road, looking for round stones. They were easy to find.

  Once, the Dunatis Sea had filled all of Stonehold, a prehistoric saline slab that crushed the hills under gradients of darkness many fathoms deep. Back then, the Duchy had been a black icy waste of glacial sediment and mollusks and mud. Sloshing against Kjnardag’s feet, licking at the mountains’ boots, the great sea had retreated slowly, pulled into the Duchy’s pit over epochs like a slavering beast on chains.

  Sena glanced north where High Horn filled a quarter of the sky. The sight of its eternal snows glaring through the ragged humid thatch of summer sent a dissonant chill up her spine.

  She stopped and dabbed her forehead with her sleeve, knowing for some time now that she was being followed. It’s time, she decided. The last cottage was a half-mile back. Her pursuer would make herself known.

  Sena turned abruptly into an untilled uphill stretch of meadow and vanished from the road. Disintegrating posts screened the weed-choked field from a soggy ditch. Split and crusty with thallus, the posts barely sustained a rusted string of barbules and broken wire mesh.

  She dissolved into the bracken, knowing that the sounds of popple bugs and katydids would mask her movement. Her sickle knife was out. Her eyes fought for glimpses through snarled coils of cockle vine and stymphalian grass. She ignored the predacious ephemera flashing through the weeds. A huge beetle, banded black and rotten orange, landed on her hand. She let it be.

  From the road came the faint sound of a single person clapping in applause.

  “You’re very good, Sienae. Very good . . .”

  A woman’s voice helped pinpoint the noise. Sena stayed hidden in the grass. She could see a blond woman standing on the road, sickle in hand, gazing vaguely in her direction.

  “I only came to talk,” said Miriam, slipping into Withil. “Muthiroo fritou uviroo hirou gorloo.19”

  Right, thought Sena cynically, I’m sure she does. She scanned the road for others.

  As if able to read her thoughts, Miriam called out again in Withil, “I’m alone, Sienae. Megan didn’t send a qloin. As if she ever would. I know the Willin Droul are after you. The Sisterhood can help. Come out and talk to me. I’m obviously no threat . . . to the Seventh House.” She added Sena’s rank like a reluctant concession, as an afterthought.

  She watched the weeds intently. Miriam turned as she spoke, scanning the ditches in every direction.

  But Sena wasn’t willing to risk a confrontation—yet.

  She pricked her finger deeply for a legerdemain that distorted the air above the road. The Unknown Tongue trickled from her lips.

  Miriam must have felt the subtle shift in temperature. Must have guessed that trickery would follow.

  Sena’s voice came out from the weeds, speaking in Withil. “I didn’t really like your article in the Herald.”

  Even though she had been waiting for a response, Sena’s voice obviously startled Miriam, who regained her composure quickly and continued to turn as she spoke, guessing correctly that Sena had holomorphically masked the origin.

  “Sienae . . . you saw the hex . . . you know Fallow Down is only the beginning. Leave this place. Come back to Skellum—where it’s safe.”

  “I doubt you’re concerned about my well-being, grda.20 You’ve probably poisoned Megan with your suspicions.”

  Miriam smiled. “Are you guilty of something?”

  Sena scoffed. “I’m the High King’s witch. Don’t you read the papers?”

  “That’s pårn. Megan sent you to Stonehold. No one’s accusing you of fårn. I’m sure you—”

  “I’m not using him,” said Sena hotly. Her anger was real. “Go back to Skellum. Send a qloin if you like. I’m not coming back.”

  Sena crept forward. By the time Miriam had turned around again, Sena stood in full view at the edge of the untilled field, glaring. The sight forced Miriam to take several steps back.

  Sena walked forward. Careless. Unafraid. Miriam stumbled.

  “This is my country, now,” said Sena.

  Miriam looked surprised, like she had lost her train of thought. There was not enough blood on Sena’s finger for her to use.

  “Tell the Sisterhood I am my own witch. Tell them I intend to stay here.”

  “The hex—”

  “Does it look like my holomorphy is suffering? I will break Megan’s hex. I will bind what stones remain. I will patch the holes Gr-ner Shie is floundering through. I will undo this thing. I am not your Sister anymore.”

  Apparently Miriam had nothing to say. Maybe she even believed that Sena wasn’t bluffing, that she was capable of doing all the things she said.

  “You have it then . . . ?” Miriam whispered in reverential awe. “You’ve found it?”

  Sena gave a crooked smile. “Found what, grda?”

  Miriam trembled. “The book. The book for binding gods.”

  Sena hesitated. There was danger in being overly sure. If she admitted, if she confessed, the Sisterhood would send more than a single qloin. She hadn’t even opened it. Confirming Miriam’s accusation would be folly, so s
he demurred.

  “If I had the Csrym T why would I bother hiding from you?”

  Miriam’s face revealed an inner struggle with the logic Sena posed. She seemed to hang between two presumptions as Sena backed her down the road.

  Sena stopped. She raised her arm and pointed her sickle at the other woman’s heart.

  “Leave Stonehold . . . while you can. .21”

  At the sound of the Unknown Tongue, patterns of darkness rolled over the ground like clouds covering up the sun. Sena had split her finger open again by discreetly tugging her thumb along the tip of her knife.

  The limited illusion that she chose was that her body turned into shadows, blending with the patterns on the ground.

  A semisolid darkness remained in the place where she had been, holding Miriam’s eyes fixed while Sena darted south into the field by the road.

  Miriam was left to catch her breath in the aftermath of the well-wrought glamour. For the first time in her life, she respected Sienae Iilool. Up until today she had never squared off against Megan’s girl. She had never seen firsthand the precision with which Sena wielded the Unknown Tongue.

  Any witch could throw a glamour and adjust its output with different numbers in a string. Flaws in the glamour happened when the equation got cluttered with variables that hadn’t been properly reduced. It was the difference between saying something loquaciously and keeping it succinct.

  Brevity made a glamour urgent, lucid and exact. Wordy castings added ambiguity and room for doubt.

  Sena’s had been exquisitely efficient, pared to the bone, fitted precisely to flex the muscle of a particular effect. Her illusion preyed on Miriam’s mind. She was held in thrall by the sudden fleeting shadows and Sena’s meteoric evacuation of the road. Like a murder of crows had been wheeling overhead, the shadows on the road wove and flickered. The grasses bent in a sudden gust. A menacing black shape hung for a moment, a Sena-shaped daemon in the air.

  After the glamour passed, Miriam realized her heart was pounding in her chest. Yes. She respected Megan’s protégé intractably now. Sena’s voice filled the weeds with threatening whispers.