The Last Page

by Anthony Huso

  She takes tertiary hallways to minimize the chance of being stopped.

  Reddish bands of light from the arrow loops slash her face. The steam of her breath vaporizes in the halls she leaves behind.

  With anxious rapidity, she moves up even more stairs and out onto the sun-raked parapet that encloses the massive roof.

  Here, the sun still shines over the eastern mountains and gleams icily off slate and lead. Her feet jump the gutters. The gargoyles seem to watch.

  She opens a small door to the high tower and goes up, forever turning to the right. When she reaches the top, she throws open the door.

  The highest room in the city is empty.

  A surprised bird lifts out a window as Sena steps cautiously inside.

  Carefully rolled maps rest on the war table along with small wooden figures of men and horses. Eleven of the wooden figures are more painstakingly carved than the others. They sit by themselves in a little group.

  There is a halgrin with picked-out wooden scales, and standing by itself, the figure of a king.

  She picks it up, turns it over. On the base are crude hand-carved words: For Caliph.

  The wind from the sea whines harshly over the sills. Up here, she can see beyond the low mountains of the peninsula to where the sun, in scalloped pink, drowns in a cloudy film of waves.

  “Miss?”

  Sena jerks her head to see a young woman in black and white. She is wiping her hands on a cloth and looking both shy and concerned.

  “His majesty just left, though I haven’t any idea where. Would you like me to bring you something? Coffee?”

  Sena shakes her head almost imperceptibly.

  “We haven’t seen you for days,” the maid offers. “Welcome back.”

  Alani helped his fellows escape their fleshy prisons: nine handpicked agents under his command. The refrigerated compartment had been fitted with a door that also opened from the inside.

  His team removed the insulated suits and helmets, strapped on their gear and weapons and sprung the groaning metal door as softly as they knew how.

  They gave hand signals in the blue-lit cargo hold and disappeared into the labyrinth of crates.

  Quietly, the ship changed hands.

  Alani’s men went through the berths. They examined papers, identification cards, diaries and personal effects. They isolated their captives, told each of them that all their mates were dead.

  They asked bizarre questions.

  Which of the crew were loners? Which hadn’t any family? Who had the fewest friends?

  Some of the crew began to suspect the obvious deception. Truth remained irrelevant. They could coordinate no logical resistance. Even if they could, the bag of gear Alani clutched inside his frozen cyst contained (among other things) mostly superfluous implements of suppression.

  Two would-be heroes were soothed with needles that out-flowed powerful tranquilizers. When they lulled into glassy stupors Alani’s men moved them to the galley.

  The period of solitary confinement came to an end.

  The unmarried, the orphaned and the misanthropic were stripped of their uniforms. Naked and terrified, they were held down and injected with hypodermics full of yellow drug. Their captors didn’t bother to sterilize the needles between injections.

  In several minutes it would not matter.

  Ten nude airmen were untied. They stumbled around the compartment in a narcotized trance while Alani’s men herded them toward a shuttered hatch.

  Outside, the sky blew dark and torrential.

  One by one, the men were hurled into space. They fell for several thousand feet before landing with unheard thumps and clatters like bags of broken sticks among the rocks or soggy moors west of the Somber Hills.

  It was messy work.

  The spies did not think about it. Their mission turned Saergaeth’s airmen into packages—each one nothing more than perfidious jetsam.

  The remaining eight (that had not been drugged) were forced to watch. They screamed and clenched their teeth and eyes and tried to look away.

  “Sorry mates,” Alani whispered when all the doomed were gone. “That’s the sentence for traitors to Stonehold.”

  His men put on the defenestrated crewmen’s uniforms. They held them up, eyeballed fit like shoppers. They traded. Mixed and matched.

  Eventually even Alani resembled one of Saergaeth’s low rank flyboys.

  One of his men had medical expertise.

  He took the remaining crewmen and by means of a strange contraption forced back their upper and lower lids. Carefully he distended each man’s left eyeball and inserted a bead of holomorphic glass into the underlying socket. Then he popped the eye back in place.

  After an hour, all the implants had been done.

  Alani’s spies thoroughly explored every cranny of the ship. They gathered for the pep talk they knew was coming.

  The eight remaining members of the crew were untied.

  They sat nervously in wooden chairs listening to the thunder, eyeballs aching.

  Alani looked ghastly in the fluttering weirdness of several lamps. At least he hoped he did. He had chosen this spot for the effect. His pocked cheeks and bristly dome would enhance his gaunt, sinister mien. He lit his pipe and puffed while resting his foot on the seat of a chair.

  He could tell the crew was frightened. They paid sedulous attention to every word he spoke. They were men who ferried metholinate, not professional soldiers. Enamored with Saergaeth’s leadership, they made the easy, popular choice, siding against Caliph Howl—a man whom none of them had ever seen.

  “You are traitors,” said Alani with slow congenial syllables. “But can still avoid a traitor’s fate.”

  He began the propaganda he was an expert at delivering and explained that the bead in their eye was holomorphically linked to a single bead in his hand. If he crushed the one, the other eight would shatter. They were filled with toxin that would go directly to the brain.

  “If any one of you should betray the High King again by compromising this mission, you will die. And you will have killed the other seven . . . your friends and crew . . . in addition to yourself.”

  It was a lie. The beads of glass were totally innocuous.

  “When we have finished this mission, I promise you . . . we will remove the implants. You will be granted clemency, free to return to your families and your jobs after swearing allegiance to the High King.

  “After this war is over we will all be Stonehavians again.”

  One of the men laughed even though he looked terribly afraid. “How can we possibly trust you?”

  Alani didn’t smile.

  “Trust? I don’t want your trust. As traitors to your country you are being coerced, gentlemen. Let us call it what it is.”

  “We’re not traitors. We’re patriots,” said the zeppelin captain. “And you sir, are a murderous liar. The very kind we’re fighting against.”

  Alani grinned. His teeth were yellow and crooked and he knew it. He looked the captain directly in the face for maximum effect.

  “You’ll get no argument from me on your second point since lies and murder are my business, sir. But I will tell you, Captain . . .” he referenced a book in his claw of a hand, “Bayans . . . that your assessment of me, while true, is inconsequential.

  “Patriotism is a vagary defined by your individual hopes. Whatever you perceive national interests to be . . . however jingoistic or expropriationist. I myself am a pacifist and loyal to the crown which is no doubt where your sanctimonious diatribe springs from and why we do not see eye to eye.

  “Let me be clear, Mr. Bayans, and ask you one question. When orders eventually came . . . as they surely would have . . . from Miskatoll to drop ordnance on the capital of your own country . . . would you have obeyed them?”

  The captain said nothing. Perhaps some of his men were beginning to realize that the moral high ground he was clinging to was just another smear. Alani hoped as much.

  “No?” aske
d Alani. “Either way you answer, as the commander of this airship, it’s going to sound rather bad coming from those patriotic lips.

  “Perhaps, Mr. Bayans, I have saved you from your sins. But I digress.” Alani waved his pipe. “I see from your diary that you have a young son and daughter and a wife at home. Which brings us back to your stunning lack of choice in the matter and the truth of my grip on everything you hold dear. Do we understand one another?”

  It was overkill to threaten the man’s family and Alani knew it. But in the current situation he frankly didn’t care.

  The captain looked stricken. His men were completely cowed.

  Still, one last question had to be asked. If it hadn’t, Alani would have been fabulously surprised.

  “How did you get on board?”

  Alani ended his smoke and tapped the dottle into his palm. He had no intention of answering.

  The question by itself was enough. Caliph’s plan had been chillingly neat. He had tabulated casualties as a prerequisite for any plausible charade, hence the timing of Ghoul Court’s violent raid.

  There wasn’t any crash along the White Leech. No crew of fifty airmen had gone down. But there had been bodies . . . plenty of bodies to advance that illusion.

  The men of the Orison had met their weeping, joyful families in Octul Box at the lavish government estate. The crew had told their wives and children the only thing they knew—that their deaths had been faked to advance some strategy in war and that, for now, all of them had to stay under lock and key until the High King signed their eventual release.

  Caliph too had coldly envisioned the execution of half a sky shark’s crew and the psychological brutality required to ensure the loyalty of the rest. But it was only the beginning, thought Alani, only the first edge of a very complex and complicated plan.

  Caliph returned with Roric Feldman in custody and watched the Precursor dock over West Gate. It floated in above the heavy leaded obelisks whose panes boiled with emerald light. The beacons’ gleam scintillated, created columns in the glittering rain.

  After the other ships had moored, the Byun-Ghala pitched north across the gray-swept city. Caliph tried not to think about what Alani was doing. He tried not to think about what would happen to Roric Feldman. He supposed their paltry adolescent feud had finally ended. Caliph Howl had won. It didn’t feel good.

  He thought about the fresco on his bedroom ceiling, about tossing and turning during the course of oncoming sleepless nights. Isca slid by underneath him, gliding like the mottled back of a deformed nocturnal beast. He looked out from the observation deck through the rain, at the towers of his castle. There were lights, dim warm lights in his bedroom window and for a moment he dared to dream.

  Sena had fretted through the evening after deciding once again not to try and escape.

  She read from the Csrym T.

  Terrified of Caliph’s return she shut the ancient book with restive fingers and began a series of mindless preparations.

  She took a bath. She oiled her ringlets, her sex, misted her flesh with the pore-clenching chill of Tebeshian perfume. She got dressed. The clothes she picked were diabolic. She knew just which things against her skin might drive the High King mad.

  She checked her glowing watch four times as the room began to blush. The rosy light faded quickly and the sumptuous shadows around the bed turned brown.

  The room cooled. She called a servant to light a fire despite the groaning foment in the radiator pipes. For a while, she sat mutely, preoccupied before the mirror. She penciled in her eyes and lips while her intestines wrung themselves through a series of algetic knots.

  Her reflection was resplendent. Fishnet black and satin covered up her fear. Laces on her corset and sequential cunning straps battened down her persistent bent to fly. Hair and eyes, gold and sapphire, lips of buccal ruby: she was something gleaming but restrained, dark jewels set in velveteen soot.

  A beguilement, she thought, that he will see right through.

  As the grandfather clock tolled seventeen, the storm stilled and the clouds opened on the night. She left the cluttered vanity and poised near the western windows, faced but hardly looking at the magnesium fizzle of starlight.

  The room was quiet when she turned her head in the direction of the door. A figure had materialized soundlessly, shrouded in the doughy darkness that stretched like something clotting in the corner of the room.

  She held her breath.

  A wayward glistening twist of her perfect hair dangled, catching firelight. Sena brushed it self-consciously, presenting her lure. She calculated the forward motion of her hips, pushing her pose over the edge of art, spilling her presentation into the void of breathless concupiscence.

  She moved as though blown, ignoring her heart that twitched like something in a snare.

  She had already taken several steps when she realized it wasn’t Caliph at the door.

  A thin man in Desdae’s raven-colored scholar robes seemed to hover just above the floor. He watched her with Cimmerian eyes. Narrow, pallid lips overdrew a baleful smile and hair as fine as cotton candy trembled in a cat’s-paw off the sea.

  The door opened behind him, swung through his semiform and erased him from the room.

  Caliph stood nearly where the old man had been, slack jawed, gawking.

  Despite her obvious effect on him, Sena’s poise had vaporized. Whether the old man had been real remained for some successive mental debate. Right now the moment of her opportunity was in jeopardy.

  She forced her nerves to trickle back. She would not allow herself to lose this second chance—not until she had made a sterling assault.

  Already she could see that Caliph’s inarticulate stupor had begun to harden into skepticism. Skepticism that he hurled at her with excruciating efficiency.

  It startled her—to be an outsider.

  Caliph seemed newly minted, as if she was seeing him for the first time. Palan’s tail, she thought, he’s changed! He’s changed and I never even noticed. She imagined the cruelty that must have passed like iced croissants around his table every morning. Those meetings. The endless plotting. Everyone he thought he could trust had sold him out. Even she. And now she was here, uninvited—and she couldn’t blame him, she couldn’t fault him in the least.

  He walked past her, toward wardrobes still filled with bodices and lace.

  “I’m a bitch,” she whispered. It stopped him in his tracks.

  He turned like a weapon on a turret: tensile, dark and cocked. Sena saw him scratch his arm.

  “Not good enough.”

  Although his words were nasty and deliberate she realized all of a sudden that they weren’t true. It was like she had climbed inside his head. She could tell that the sight of her was enough and she could hear him berating himself. You uxorious beaten little man! His eyes gave it away: how he loathed himself right now. His face told her that any arrows she fired would kill him on the spot.

  She saw him understand that she knew. It was instantaneous. Like telepathy. And to her astonishment, he didn’t attempt a charade or try to cover it up. It made her want him in a callow, unexpected way. The expression on his face was beyond her capability to exploit.

  It was awkward, embarrassing and thankfully without audience. Instead of victory, Sena felt like she had melted. Her sense of vulnerability ballooned. She couldn’t help it. She was ashamed of the tenderness that had jelled the air.

  “You’re right. You are a bitch . . .”

  Tenderness noted. Appreciated. Temporarily set aside.

  “I was going to leave. I didn’t think you . . .” she shook her head, “would take me back.”

  It was a safe thing to say. Moronic and simple and clichéd. After all, Caliph’s expression had made it clear that he did, that he had already taken her back.

  Caliph said a few more sour words.

  Sena fired back once or twice, explained herself with competent precision. For his part, he did an admirable job of remaining cold.
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br />   The parrying went on for two minutes at most, consisting mostly of disingenuous threats.

  Finally Caliph sighed to indicate that he was done.

  “You can stay here. I’ll sleep downstairs.”

  He confiscated a pillow and left the room.

  That he told her where he was going and didn’t take a blanket, that he gave the bed to her, were all she needed to know for certain that she had been forgiven.

  Her heart started beating again. She knew by any stretch that he had let her off easy. It bothered her.

  She followed him from the room, watched him trudge down the grand stairs and plop down in front of the first floor’s fireplace.

  He was sulking. A sack of anger on the leather sofa. But she was trained for this. It would be like pressing a deep aposteme, forcing an eruption, getting at the core. She would squeeze his anger out. It would be surgical. Tonight it would be pårn and . . . it would be pårn because she loved him.

  She went down. When she crawled on top of him, when she perched for him in poses that were ludicrous, he didn’t look away. Her motions were smooth and daedal. Exquisite. Outlandish. It was a pantomime, a rising chaos that she stylized and turned, gripped professionally and molded into perfect form. It wasn’t just a striptease or a succubus straddling a man in the huge echoing hall. It wasn’t a pair of imperiled creatures grinding blindly on the edge of salvation. It wasn’t that. It was Sena’s adaptation. A slow-moving, living sculpture. She crafted it with subsecondal precision and gave it to Caliph as a gift.

  He didn’t push it away or ridicule it as another cheap pretense. She steeled herself in case he did. Instead he accepted it, embraced it and eventually wore himself out against it, collapsing into unconsciousness that lasted far beyond the dawn.

  CHAPTER 35

  Caliph realized that Gadriel had found them. They were draped across each other, barely covered by a blanket of black leveret. The High Seneschal had already established a perimeter around the room, using sentries to block every door and passageway that might admit a curious member of the castle staff.