The Last Page ch-1

by Anthony Huso

  She was intentionally unbuttoned, just enough to reveal the ruffle of lace cupping her breasts. She had worn the lotion that smelled like Tebeshian coffee. On his second turn at the slide, when he had reached for the monocular, she had pivoted instead of stepping aside. His hand had gone through the loop of her arm, brushing past her body. They were the same height. She had stared him down, bitten her lower lip and refused to move.

  Finally . . . finally, he had pushed her up against the counter. She remembered him fumbling with her skirt, lifting it up around her waist. She had pulled his belt away like a snake, gripping it by the head before letting it clatter dramatically to the floor. The cool laboratory air had shocked them both, forced them together for warmth, a catalyst, carrying them into the next stage of their relationship.

  It took a month, but Sena realized slowly that Caliph was becoming part of the recipe. She found his affections refreshingly devoid of the bravado and lachrymose fawning she thought of as the two schoolboy extremes. His attention to her was crystalline, immediately clear yet full of cunning. She saw it in the way he ignored her during class, focusing intently on the lecture. Then a note would suddenly arrive in her hand, written in acrostic code. She would read it with amazement and look at him but he would never look back.

  As the weeks passed, she returned to her project: something she concealed carefully from Caliph for several reasons . . . collecting every reference she could until suddenly the Csrym T vanished, seemingly for good.

  The last trace was a holomorph, almost two decades ago in the Duchy of Stonehold. She read that his rise to power had gone sideways. Body surfaced at the base of the sea wall in Isca in the fall of ′45. Only his mansion, auctioned and hollow, was left crumbling in the foothills of the Healean Range.

  The Csrym T must have been auctioned with the rest of the estate amid vast lots of books. It frightened her to think that she had reached the end of what she could read. Her graduation was approaching. If this was what she wanted, she knew she had to shift from thinking to doing. It made her nervous, but Caliph had taught her, in the way he had orchestrated their relationship, how to execute on a plan.

  He hadn’t wanted the situation they began in: risking expulsion every night, sneaking behind Brie House. But once he had chosen it, he showed no regret. When it came to the code and motto, he had adjusted smoothly from rigid obedience to deft evasion.

  During the day, they went to class in Githum Hall and the Woodmarsh Building, vaguely listening to lectures while composing notes that promised, in code, what they would do to each other later that night. Caliph devised ways to meet in the machine shed, the stable, the shadows of the mill. They risked disaster by sneaking into Desdae Hall and altering chore assignments on the chancellor’s ledger, ensuring they shared custodial duties in same buildings at like times.

  One afternoon, while Professor Blynsk was droning at the blackboard and Sena was watching leaves tantalize window glass, a note poked into her palm written in the usual code. It said simply:

  If the haberdasher alters seven threads, only evens need dye.

  Her fingers went numb and her stomach turned. Something had gone wrong. The translation was brutally succinct: It has to end.

  It has to end? Why was he saying this? She looked across the room. For the first time, he looked back. He smiled faintly from his desk near the door, winked at her; then got up and left the room.

  Forty minutes later it had spread across campus that Caliph Howl was in the chancellor’s office for stealing.

  The theft was remarkable. He had taken the clurichaun from Desdae Hall and it was still missing.

  “Night watch for sure if he doesn’t get expelled . . .”

  “He’ll get expelled.”

  “No he won’t. He’s fucking heir-apparent to the Iscan High Throne. He’ll get night watch.”

  “Why do you think he took it?”

  “Attention.”

  Sena listened to gossip flickering over the lawn. One of her dorm sisters passed her with a sadistic smile. “Looks like no more fun for you . . .”

  Sena went to lunch. She went to class. When evening settled, the lights in the Administration Building still burnt. Caliph had not come out.

  It had leaked that a sentence was coming down and it would not be expulsion. Bets on the lawn now began circulating as to the duration of Caliph’s punishment.

  “Nine months. Night watch.”

  “A year.”

  “If the clurichaun stays missing, he’ll be watchman ’til he graduates . . .”

  Students speculated and smoked and drank coffee outside Desdae Hall. Sena loitered, mingling with them, repeatedly denying any knowledge of why her “friend” had stolen the intricate southern mechanism.

  Night watch required the student so sentenced to sleep not in the comfort of the dorms, but to stalk the drafty expanse of the library until eighteen o’clock. At midnight, the student could bed down on the floor near one of the radiators. No cots were allowed. A campus watchman checked in on the prisoner once at fifteen and again at two in the morning. If, during his shift, anything was damaged or stolen, the student was expelled without further delay.

  At seven, from the Administration Building, the sound of a caning began, which meant—according to popular opinion—that Caliph had yet to divulge the location of the missing clurichaun.

  Silence settled over the lawn, partially out of awe for Caliph’s cries, which floated through an open window, and partially so the number of strokes could be counted.

  Sena winced, marveling at his stupidity.

  At seven-o-five the caning was complete. Twenty strokes had been administered, just shy of the maximum.

  The Administration Building’s doors finally opened at twenty past and a lone figure appeared, a shade in the darkness that dragged over the threshold, stooped and stiff like an old man. It plodded down the steps and across the lawn. Going to him now would lacquer another layer onto the already lustrous veneer of rumors that surrounded the two of them; so Sena stayed with the others, watching as he crossed the empty campus alone, headed directly for the library, a ring of keys in his hand. At the doors, he jingled softly without looking back and disappeared inside.

  The knot of students broke up. Sena went home and slept fitfully.

  The entire next day, she anticipated her own meeting with the chancellor. It was common talk that she and Caliph were possibly more than friends. It made sense that the chancellor would question her. But surprisingly, no summons ever came. Caliph met her between classes near Nasril Hall, under the shade of an enormous tree. He was disheveled and grim, hollow-eyed and somewhat pale. She had watched him stand rather than sit during class and he was still walking with a limp.

  “Everything’s set,” he said simply. “You can come to the library any night you want.”

  Sena’s jaw dropped. This had been his plan?

  “Are you crazy?”

  “I’ve minimized our risk. No more stables or closets.”

  “You didn’t do this for me.”

  “Ever since you crept up on me in the library, I figured you’re a damn good sneak. All you have to do is make it to the cellar doors without being seen. Think about it, we’re inside a locked building, alone.”

  “You are crazy.” Sena pointed at the brick-gabled windows of the chancellor’s house. They faced the library directly.

  Caliph responded without agitation. “Do you really think he will be watching? He knows I’m too smart to risk getting caught. Besides,” he jingled the ring of keys, “we can go anywhere in the library! Think of the private book collections!”

  Sena looked at them. Each had been wired with stiff white paper and labeled with the names of various rooms.

  “I know you’ve had a brush with the chancellor and can’t afford another office visit. But I can. He’s never going to expel me.” Caliph looked at her directly. “He can’t afford to expel me.”

  “Yella byn,2 Caliph! Are you telling me you made a de
al with him?”

  For a moment his dark eyes burrowed into her face. Finally he said, “No one’s going to bother us.”

  Her stomach soured. She felt queasy-sick inside, but he had not done this extraordinary thing to generate pity. He had done it with the single goal of moving their relationship beyond the reach of the school motto, facilitating something stable and private. She decided not to dwell on the horror of the caning. Instead, she gave him what he wanted, a smile.

  “Can I at least get in by myself?”

  “This isn’t about picking locks. This is about keeping quiet. Staying hidden.”

  She played along. “Ooh—an esoteric society. Just the two of us?” Her knuckles rapped an imaginary door. “Will there be secret knocks?”

  Caliph grinned despite his obvious pain.

  He had taught her how to execute on a plan regardless of personal cost.

  Since then, there had been wine, books and plenty of sex. The library had remained bearable even as Kam faded into Thay, Shem and Oak, reducing the wooded campus to lifeless brown and frosty white.

  Sometimes they used the fireplaces. Sometimes they just listened to the coal boiler in the basement, indigestion flushing through its pipes. The night watchman scheduled to check up on Caliph twice a night never came.

  Her stomach warmed. Maybe it was love.

  But it wasn’t Caliph that elicited her strongest emotions. That still came from the scrap of paper she had found in Githum Hall, burning like a cruestone in her brain. Its black sparkle steered her toward a course of actions on which she was now utterly resolved.

  Caliph wouldn’t understand even if she had been able to tell him. He had steeped himself in the modern cauldron of business and government. For him, holomorphy was quaint. And besides, the recipe was clear. She couldn’t tell him.

  He’ll be fine, she thought. I need this. He has a whole country waiting for him. I just need him to open the book . . .

  Breath sweetened through a filter of wanton bouquets, Sena tossed her flower-flavored chewing gum like the pin from a grenade. It landed in the dark, forgotten behind spider-infested bundles of spare pipe while the chemical reaction it had induced continued to swell.

  Sena let it go. Her mouth opened; her pelvis flexed forward.

  Even in the beginning, despite no history of his own, Caliph had been better than Tynan, better than several sophomoric fumblings she had endured for the sake of release. Tonight, they drew it out, seeming to understand the potential finality of this encounter.

  Caliph’s breathing changed and Sena shifted her rhythm, calculating their trajectory, applying tension to the spring.

  It was her private metaphor: the catapult. The sudden pitch in her stomach that signaled her body going numb. Like being launched into the air at the circus and floating . . . floating . . .

  After that came the zoetrope. Warmth washing through her like sheet lightning. She had discovered it with Caliph. The pleasant spinning, her senses so overstimulated that her body stuttered like pictures in a little moving wheel, arching backward in a series of staccato animations.

  Catapult then zoetrope. Only with Caliph.

  “So soon—?” She uncoiled the playful whisper directly into his ear. “A little unexpected, huh?” She breathed hard, watched Caliph close his eyes and nod.

  Her voice took on a whispered ecstasy.

  “Wow—I’m kind of proud of myself.” And she was. She was happy.

  Caliph pinched her earlobe with his lips and rested his forehead on her shoulder. She adjusted her body.

  Blue light from the clurichaun bubbled across them. It stood politely all of six inches tall with its back to them. The glass bulb full of solvitriol fluid illuminated tiny sprockets and whirring, jewel-crusted gears that comprised its internal organs.

  Caliph had hidden the object of inestimable worth in the library. Several professors of engineering had been able to replicate it (except for its esoteric power source) with variable results.

  It had been two years since the play, two years since they had broken Tanara’s nose; two years since Roric Feldman had failed at school and gone home in shame.

  After-sex hunger was making Sena’s stomach growl. Caliph put his ear to the hollow of her navel and listened.

  “It’s talking,” he grinned, raising a finger. “Wait, wait . . .” He paused intently. “It says . . . we should eat!”

  The muscles of her abdomen tightened under the tickle of his chin. “Mm—I want ice cream. I want to get fat as an airship.” She looked at him expectantly; blue clurichaun fire ghosting her eyes.

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  His candor frightened her as she realized he meant a pregnancy. She turned it quickly into a joke. “Oh? You like ’em big? Huh?” She cupped her breasts and shook them at him. “Aren’t I broad enough for you to ride?” She laughed at her own pun. “Fat as a zeppelin, I swear!”

  He tugged her toward him, kissed her skin. “Have you ever been on a zeppelin?”

  “My mother didn’t have the money. We took a coal ship from Greenwick to the Coasts of Gath.”

  “What were you on Greenwick for?”

  “I was born there.”

  “You told me you were from Miryhr.”

  “I am. But I was born on Greenwick—I belong to the isles.”

  She regretted that Miryhr had entered the conversation. She could see him thinking about it. He had pestered her only occasionally over the past two years for information about the Witchocracy.

  “You know the cane-eyen legend?” he asked suddenly. “The one where all the Miryhric farmers wake up to find a third eye grown in the top of their dogs’ heads? Is that true? Did the Shrdnae Sisterhood really do that?”

  Sena scowled but didn’t scold him for asking. It was only natural for him to be interested.

  Widespread rumors trickled through the north, endorsed and disseminated by several watchful governments. They gave an accounting of what were said to be Shrdnae witches captured in Isca. Their beauty had been erased. They had no eyes, no legs and half a tongue; they pulled themselves through the slums of Ghoul Court in wheeled boxes inches off the ground. The High King put them there: broken, blind, stitched-up pets that wandered the streets until winter came and froze them in their wheeled crates.

  By the end of Tes, their bodies became small humps of gray statuary that huddled under fire escapes. Eventually the street sweepers pulled them out into wintry light. They had to pry the bodies out with crowbars. Urine had frozen, grafted them to wood. They fell like bags of cement into Bragget Canal where virulent waters opened black steaming holes in the ice. Then the street sweepers watched without malice, smoking and talking as the legless forms went down, sinking in an undertow drawn by turbines in lower Murkbell, far beyond the opera house.

  It was dramatic. Possibly embellished. But it was also at least partly true and the reason Sena kept her secret. Caliph could not know she was a witch.

  Caliph’s eyes followed her lips as she answered the question. She remembered that he had once told her they were overly sensual, as if her lips could run away and fornicate with him behind her back. He had told her once that they were cheating lips.

  Sena watched the clurichaun as it took two clicking steps and dispatched a black crawling shape with its tiny metal claw.

  “I’ve got two more years,” Caliph mentioned. “I suppose you’re going to start forgetting me tomorrow.”

  “Are you telling me what you want me to do?” She kept her smile lighthearted.

  “Maybe. Maybe I don’t want to think about you after you’re gone.”

  She laughed and looked into the rafters. She knew what he really meant—that the loneliness would be painful for him despite his best effort to keep these intimacies cordoned off.

  The attic was so old it could not keep all the wind out and low oscillating moans gave voice to drafts with origins impossible to trace.

  The clurichaun was stomping around, as much as a one-pound mechanism
could stomp, casting weird blue halos from its power source. The light disturbed other creatures and somewhere below the rafters came the soft rustle of leathery shapes and the faint chitter of obscure winged things that posed no threat to humans or machines.

  “I don’t think you’ll be able to help it,” Sena said.

  “Sometimes . . .” Caliph paused. “I think you love me.”

  “It’s only two years.” She curled into him, pressing for warmth as the air chilled her back. “I’ll visit you, or you can visit me after you get your degree.”

  “Sounds too . . .”

  “Trust me,” she whispered. “You make truth, and I’m making it so.”

  Caliph sighed. “Eight years. Nothing seems simple anymore—”

  A spring moon glowed in the transom they had cleaned. Sky the color of exotic olives moiled Naobi’s halo while fragile whiplike branches scraped the glass. Wind coming under the shingles made the attic sound too familiar. The smell, the darkness, the soft sounds; these secret nights in the guano-besmirched loft had become part of them. Tomorrow everything would change.

  “Listen, Caliph. I’m going south. I’m headed for trouble.” She grinned and slid her finger over his mouth. “I’m looking for something special. Something Professor Gullows managed to leave out of his lessons.”

  Caliph turned his head. “What is it?”

  “It’s a book,” she whispered. “Every holomorph in the Hinterlands would die to get their hands on it . . . if they knew about it.”

  “Sounds like something made up.”

  “It’s real. I’m going to find it.”

  Caliph sat up. “Then it’s a sure candidate for the printing press—”

  “Listen, you fool. Stop joking. I need you. You have to find me after you graduate. It’s important. I love you Caliph.”

  His eyes narrowed. She had never said it before.

  “You love me?”

  She smiled and leaned in to kiss him.

  Caliph stopped her.