The Last Page

by Anthony Huso

  Caliph and several other airmen descended the stairs, gripping the freezing iron tightly against the wind. They made it to the dorsum of the other airship by way of metal rungs.

  Above, the Byun-Ghala billowed, obstructing much of the sky. Below, the great airbag of Saergaeth’s ship stretched pincushion-like. A floating red island covered with petulant limbless trees.

  Near the coupling, a hatch opened into the hull. Caliph spun the handle and pulled up. Narrow dark steps descended through a slender cavity between the gasbags. They slithered down several flights.

  Finally they emerged on the ship’s bridge.

  The pilot of the enemy craft was slumped at the helm, an arm hanging through the wheel like a crowbar. His dead weight had jammed the flaps, caused the propellers to beat against fins laid perpetually to the right.

  The airmen drew swords and spread out.

  Caliph checked the pilot for wounds.

  Nothing.

  There was minor trauma to the ship, easily visible. A cannonball had entered on the port side, strafed through every intervening structure and cut through heavy reinforced stanchions as if they had been bundled straw. The missile’s velocity must have been unreal at the time of impact.

  Its remains were found after several minutes, lodged deep inside the zeppelin’s belly. Wholly melded with another object. A twisted mass of tunsia and shattered glass. Both objects had been driven up the middle of a support wall, wedged between duralumin beams, stopped at last in their catastrophic path.

  “Everyone’s dead, your majesty.”

  The analysis came back after a three-minute survey of the ship.

  “No signs of struggle. It’s like they all just fell over.”

  “It’s not right,” said another man. “Creepy as a night on Knife and Heath.”

  But Caliph’s fear had dissolved. He ushered his men back toward the Byun-Ghala. When they reached the top of the Mademoiselle’s hull he took a moment to gaze in panorama at the battle that compassed them on every side.

  Many of Saergaeth’s airships were now doing strange things. Going in circles like the Mademoiselle. Others were ascending or descending without apparent reason. One made a spectacle of dragging through Glumwood’s upper fingers, ravaged by the forest’s claws.

  Caliph suppressed a cheer.

  Back on the Byun-Ghala he heard another salvo assault the sky. The Iscan heavies were firing again.

  As the sun went down, Alani watched the war from the ground.

  He felt the wind; it walked restlessly up and down the cheerless hills.

  His men had installed nearly fifty cells.

  Split souls. Half-damned creatures.

  They were separate from the real solvitriol cells Saergaeth had found on the Orison. Half-souls couldn’t power engines. At least not conventionally. Their only force lay in the path of attraction.

  Alani’s men had carried tiny cells, barely the size of chicken eggs. They had used tunsia bolts, securing them to the frames of as many zeppelins and engines as they could. They chose places where even if the bolts gave way or the material of the frame twisted and tore under the strain of mutual attraction, the damage would be catastrophic.

  When the Iscan heavies started firing, the other half of each of Sigmund’s bisected human souls overcame whatever plasma diversion had temporarily negated their collective pull. Both halves sought each other out.

  The bullets homed in, finding the one and only target they had been made unerringly to strike.

  Unheard collisions rocked the ether, ripped bodies and souls apart while every inanimate thing remained unfazed. But it was intrinsically unpredictable.

  The Iscan heavies were firing blind, not knowing which zeppelins housed which targets or what paths their bullets would take. Some struck ships already engaged with Iscan ships. The result was indiscriminate slaughter.

  Just outside the radius of ethereal disturbance, Alani had heard other aeronauts complain of queasiness and acute unrest. Alani himself had felt the diminishing ripples, disturbing something he had never felt before, threatening to dislodge him from his fleshy shell.

  That was when Alani had taken a glider to the ground. Most of his men were dead. Despite his best efforts, extortion could only last until his psychological hostages lost hope, decided it no longer mattered whether any of them lived or died. Their beliefs were at stake. And one or two had talked, risking themselves and their fellow crewmen to the surgically implanted beads behind their eyes. The jig was up.

  Six of Alani’s men had been discovered and killed.

  Alani had fled. His men had been able to install only fifty units.

  Fifty! Less than thirty percent of what they were supposed to have done.

  Alani cursed and smoked his pipe from his hidden vantage south of Clefthollow. That meant that if every missile fired from Caliph’s heavy engines found its mark, Saergaeth’s zeppelin fleet would still be double that of the High King’s.

  Somewhere in the skies, the spymaster of Isca knew that Caliph Howl was already dead.

  More snow brought the zeppelin battle to an eerie standstill during the night. The flakes were thick and the ships stopped for fear of colliding with other vessels.

  But early in the morning, from the west, the snow was replaced by defeat: falling silently out of the clouds. Caliph couldn’t help but notice it from his dizzying position on the starboard deck. He watched mutely as the massive red bellies shredded tendrils of vapor. It had to be a dream. A nightmare. The rail became his only connection to reality. No ship. No deck. No crewmen running. Just a shaft of cold, pushed hard into both hands, solid and immovable. He gripped it tightly as the Byun-Ghala tilted in the sky.

  The directionless sense of perspective afforded by vertigo made the vast crimson skins bursting out of the clouds look like a pod of red leviathans breaching in an ocean of white. Except that it was upside down. All of it. The clouds above the battle had created a false ceiling over the entire war. Now they ruptured, spilling a second armada, scores of dark red fruit popping into existence, falling on the remnants of Caliph’s ragged fleet.

  How could Saergaeth have hidden them? Holomorphy? Caliph watched the red ships’ bays open and vomit a host of chemical bombs. The storm of canisters passed through the aerial battlefield and plummeted toward the ground. The bombardment brought even the Iscan heavies, trundling through the snow, to a creaking stop that Caliph felt physically against his heart.

  So cold, at the very center of his chest, it was like the weight of all those zeppelins had come crushing down on him. He couldn’t breathe. Saergaeth had outwitted him after all. Stonehold’s old hero had pulled together a battle plan that a boy from Desdae hadn’t been able to overcome. It had been ruthless. It had depended on superior numbers. And just when Caliph thought he had seen the full force of Miskatol brought to bear, Saergaeth had pulled back the curtain and said, Look: I have more.

  Someone was talking to him. But all he could hear was the faint explosions in the fields below.

  “Your majesty! Your majesty!”

  Caliph turned his head slowly. One of the deckhands was shouting at him, tears gushing from his eyes. Why was he crying? Men were yelling incoherently. The Byun-Ghala tilted again, sharply, engines revving. The captain was turning her away from the battle.

  “Where are we going?” asked Caliph. He felt so out of breath. “We can’t run . . .”

  The deckhand was close, right in his face. Why was he so close? He was younger than Caliph, tears streaming down his cheeks, “It’s going to be all right . . .”

  “I think I need to sit down,” Caliph whispered. But he could not move. He tried again.

  Strange.

  He looked toward his feet and suddenly saw that the deck had been blown apart right in front of him, metal bent into crazy branch-like fingers. Wood had been blasted away.

  Part of the railing, or maybe a support beam, was projecting through the center of his chest. He felt embarrassed, as if he had made
a terrible mistake. He wanted to apologize to the deckhand for not realizing what had happened.

  “Oh,” said Caliph. “Oh . . .” The clouds swept by, beautiful and gloomy; the wind was cold.

  “We’re going to get you home.” The deckhand was bawling. “Hold on . . . hold on!”

  CHAPTER 40

  The tailors presented Sena with a dozen options. She settled on a pale suede jacket, trimmed with white fur. It fit her torso like a glove, buttoning up the front with wooden toggles, cosseting her neck in a stiff fur-lined collar similar to those worn by monks in the western hills. Gorgeous wine and rose-colored embroidery flourished up and down the suede. She put it on, checked herself in the mirror and went down to deal with the commotion in the great hall.

  Even though it was practically the middle of the night, the royal huntsman had come, accompanied by the taxidermist and a group of other men.

  They had brought the creature down.

  The patio doors were opened to admit the massive head. Gadriel had balked at first but Sena was back in power (Caliph had left specific instructions) and she ordered him around with satisfaction in exchange for his treatment of her the week before. She had them haul the specimen in and hang it in the great hall.

  It was a terrifying thing. The head was small only in comparison to her memory of that night, being roughly the size and shape of a giant pumpkin.

  “Incredible specimen, my lady. An aberration perhaps never to be catalogued again.” The taxidermist held a repugnant kind of reverence for the thing.

  Sena looked at it closely. It was no less odious under the castle’s metholinate lights.

  From a distance, it might have passed as a hideous human head infected with gigantism. But closer up its brow curved too sharply back in a drastic ovoid dome stippled with dark occasional hair. The ears were tall, multipointed and labyrinthine beyond the folds of subterrestrial echolocators. Once soft and sallow, the flesh was now hard and speckled like the eggs of feral birds.

  Its nose was snubbed despite the bestial protrusion of its snout. The lips were broad, thin and indescribably cruel.

  “Took a dozen chemiostatic spears to bring it down,” said the huntsman.

  Sena felt herself grow cold as she looked at the eyes, placed by the taxidermist beneath drowsy alien lids. Their smooth black surface glistened. Midnight waters without whites. A nictating membrane slipped up at an angle, forming a milky sheath that clung laconically across the glass’s bathyal deeps.

  In the reproduction, Sena could only imagine the cosmic blackness of the originals. The replicas had been flecked by the taxidermist’s hand with ever deepening layers of tiny golden motes that glittered in the great hall’s light like twin galaxies.

  “The body is being sliced into cross sections and inserted into panes at Grouselich Hospital. It will be pickled. No doubt to be a key attraction at the Ketch Museum.” The taxidermist spoke as if everything were bright.

  Sena paged through the report that said ten men had lost their lives during the hunt, victims of the creature’s teeth and claws.

  She examined the jaws, protruding hinges that exposed multiple rows of fangs. She shivered before the trophy’s insensible gaze and defiantly extended her finger. Something compelled her to touch it. She needed to know, on a visceral level, that it was real.

  But feeling its death did little to reassure her. On the contrary, it made what she had read in the Csrym T all the more frightening because something was happening.

  For several nights, since she had hurled her formula at Skellum, she had felt Them . . . primordial bodies stirring, churning through lurid ghastly throes.

  Horrors far richer and more rarefied than the whose head was being hung in Caliph’s hall, crooned strangely through the ether. Sena could feel them in the castle, inchoate forms, reverberating, trembling: monstrous catacombs of flesh.

  Flesh was an approximation.

  “They are my gods,” Sena whispered. She could not see them, even with her eyes.

  “Excuse me?” said the huntsman.

  Sena ignored his incredulous expression and left the grand hall without excusing herself. She wandered out into the icy halls, feeling dizzy, not knowing where she was going. A whisper pulled her down a passageway she had never used before, drawing her into a deserted tourelle. From its windows she could see occasional flickers of purple light through the glass, stammering from the Pplarian guns. Seven miles out, war was raging and she knew that Caliph was losing. I need to help him . . .

  But the thought was blurry, strangely inconsequential, like the memory of something she had meant to do but then changed her mind. Sena whispered in the dark. “Soon . . .” She heard scratching voices in her head, like the needle on a phonograph with no recorded sound.

  “Soon, soon.”

  Her skull churned. A bottle full of newts. The whisper that had pulled her here was familiar now. Old and damp and chilly. Disjunctly, it induced the smell-memory of decomposing leaves. “Soon . . .” Around her, the forgotten baggage of a dozen High Kings seemed to brood. Fur cloaks, carved coffers and ugly diplomatic gifts nested like lonesome birds in the loft, dreaming darkness and betrayal.

  Sena looked out through the dirty panes at the snow-covered land. Tentacles of light filled the sky, oozing between the mountain peaks.

  She watched the veils slowly ebb and ruffle. The tentacles were breaking up as dawn approached. They refracted and moved over the north.

  She stepped closer to the window, felt the filthy panes rattle in the wind. She rested her palms against the glass and mused that maybe, just maybe, she was going mad.

  An anomalous noise from overhead jolted her back to reality.

  An old man’s whisper licked her ear canal. “Go up.”

  There was a wooden staircase that pulled down. Above it, a trapdoor glowered in the ceiling. Sena scowled and pulled the rope. The staircase lowered with a creak. This particular turret did not connect with the rest of the battlements. It hung alone in a forlorn crevice of the castle’s northwest face like an unnoticed tick in a vertical fold of hardened skin.

  There were no conventional means to reach its rooftop except the rusted door.

  Sena took hold of the bolt with both hands.

  Perhaps it’s something flapping in the wind.

  The sound came again. Precise. Betraying intent. The bolt popped back suddenly, scraping her knuckles on burred iron. She swore. Hesitantly, she put the back of her shoulder against the door.

  Ice crackled. A cold dark wind whistled in as she managed a half-inch crack. She pushed with every muscle in her body, relaxed and took another step, working her way expertly up the rickety stairs, maximizing her leverage.

  Finally the heavy hinges gave a painful snap and the trapdoor swung all the way open, smashing back against the roof, a thick sheet of ice shattering in every direction.

  A square of cloudy sky grumbled overhead. Despite the crushing cold, she wasted no time pulling herself up.

  The turret’s architecture formed a small octagon, obscure and shadowed by the castle’s walls. From its solitary rooftop she gazed down on Stonehold wrapped in snow from a perspective that obscured the city.

  To the north there was something black, as if a giant had thrown a fistful of mud at the castle wall. It clung, oblique, opaque, hiding in the gloom of the castle’s own acre-wide shadow. The air around it trembled as though thick fumes like fuel vapor, heavier than air, drooled out of it and down across the frozen moat. That, or parts of its shape were slavering back out of physical space, into the ether.

  “Why are You here?” she whispered.

  The massive thing did not move. It wavered. It writhed almost and seemed to slurp at the sky even though it made no sound. It did not move from its position on the wall. A point of light, exquisitely bright, shivered in its central void, surrounded by other lights, all of them the color of welding sparks. Its exact shape was impossible to tell, even for Sena’s eyes, because it seemed to have an invalid st
ructure. The more she looked, the more it occurred to her that it was somehow imploded, a re-entrant polygon, though softened and organic, a mushy concavity or hole rather than any shape at all. Light bent around it. It exuded cold.

  One of Them. One of the Thae’gn. Maybe it was the one she had bound to protect her at the Porch of Sth, responsible for utterly discreating the flawless Lua’grc that had attacked her in her home. Maybe it was from the Halls under Sandren. One of the Hidden. A black lump of mucus, a cancer of space. Gleaming.

  The lights inside it fizzled in and out of sight except for the great one at its center. Like a cell, that bright gleaming nucleolus surrounded by cosmic black cytoplasm, shimmering lysosomes . . .

  She was making up metaphors primarily because she had the feeling that, even with her new eyes, she wasn’t seeing it correctly, as if the gigantic thing refused to translate properly through any kind of sight.

  There was no communication from it. Nothing she could sense, except for the logical assumption that it had been drawn here by the book . . . just like its lesser cousin whose head hung in the great hall. Sena envisioned more of them, attracted by the Csrym T, cementing themselves like barnacles to Isca Castle, great abysmal vacuums of them. Deep plastered colonies of empty holes, drawing together like negative cells, building a gulf of tissue, a void, a parody of oyster flesh around a pearl, growing over the irritation of the book.

  Maybe.

  In truth she had no idea why it was here or what the book meant to it.

  The incomprehensible smell of the thing washed over her. So sweet. Like rose flesh. Like a flower she had never smelled before. It was cloying. Overpowering.

  Maybe her proof, her bolt aimed at Megan, had drawn it. After all, it was the first time she had taken numbers from the Csrym T and turned them into holomorphic force. Again, it was just a guess. Her legs felt weak. Her body modulated, softening as if subject to wavelengths emanating from its core. She had the unpleasant memory of Megan’s hex at Deep Cloister and felt like she might wobble apart, muscles waggling free of her bones.

  Is this an attack? Or am I simply too close? Like trying to swallow a strandy web of phlegm at the back of her throat, Sena had to concentrate on simple systems. She couldn’t walk; it felt like she was standing in pudding. Her thoughts slowed.