The Last Page ch-1

by Anthony Huso

  Sena felt nauseous. She drew up on her knees and looked around the shaken room. Her connection to the Porch was broken. But she could feel again. She pulled the hidden door to her study open and went wobbly and clumsy down a set of uneven steps. The room below reeked of mice.

  It was getting hard to think.

  Sena groaned. Five staggering steps. She touched the lanthorn above her worktable and flooded the cellar with light. There was a medical kit. She cracked it, rifled through and doused herself in antiseptic, yelping at the pain. She irrigated with a bottle of saline solution and realized she needed sutures. Hand quivering, she took the needle driver from the box and did the best she could, pulling her flesh together, forcing the bleeding to stop.

  It was makeshift and ugly. She knew she needed help. She wrapped a bandage around her waist and jammed the Csrym T and a few other objects into her pack.

  She hesitated a moment, weighing the odds, wondering if it was worth the energy. Then, finally committing to the task, she reached for her bookcase and pulled a thin book from the shelves. She set it in the middle of her worktable like a centerpiece, then turned and left the room.

  In her kitchen, she took a moment to scrawl a note and tack it to her corkboard. Then she set out on the two-minute walk that took her to the Stones.

  The Porch of Sth gathered starlines from all across the world, angles, lines through the Ncrpa. The Shrdnae Sisterhood used them for navigation and connecting space. Megan claimed no one outside the Sisterhood knew how to use them, that they were forgotten like the very monuments that marked them.

  But the Porch of Sth was different. Its numerology was skewed. Routes taken to the Stones from other places did not always have reciprocal lines. And lines taken away from Tue were often difficult to retrace.

  But there was one place she could go and return from and she had planned it from the beginning.

  At the Stones, Sena’s body shimmered and unwound, a two-dimensional cicatrix, a spool of black ribbon thrown from the mile-high cliff by holomorphy, fading north into nothingness.

  Where she went, she hoped, would be impossible for anyone except Caliph Howl to deduce.

  4 D.W.: Witch’s pupil.

  5 Pårn and fårn are respectively “The Duty” and “The Betrayal”. Pårn specifically is sex work to advance the Sisterhood’s political agenda. Fårn is sex for personal reasons and seen as jeopardizing the Sisterhood’s veil of secrecy.

  CHAPTER 6

  The train crawled between the Spine Mountains and howled over the Medysan Bog. Caliph got off at Crow’s Eye. Even stopped, the great hideous thing flickered with people: bodies adjusting behind three stories of slotted white windows. The obscene black cars repeated like segments of a myriapede, fading back along the Vaubacour Line.

  Caliph dispersed with the rest of the passengers, fading from the platform like engine steam.

  In the east, the sun had left ruins in the clouds. He found the toilets locked and crouched behind the station. Far away, the horizon crumpled with distant humidity. A glimmer that might have been an airship floated south. Caliph finished up. There was no shortage of waste paper. He wrinkled his nose and made due.

  Just then, a man’s cough startled him. A slender silhouette emerged from the deserted platform, utterly featureless in the dark. Caliph buckled his belt. He watched the man, who didn’t seem to notice him, take a set of cement stairs down behind a fence that was alive with spectral bits of paper.

  Caliph took one step and his foot hit a can. It sang mournfully off the gravel. The man stopped and turned in Caliph’s direction. He stood there, too long, staring directly into the blackness. Maybe he was frightened. Maybe he was a thug.

  “It’s just me,” Caliph finally said, feeling stupid. “The toilets were locked.”

  The man said nothing. He continued to stare.

  Caliph stepped out into a gray tangent of streetlight. When he did, he thought he heard the other man gasp.

  Caliph tried again. “I didn’t mean to startle you . . . nowhere else for me go—”

  “You rode from Greymoor?” The other man’s voice was older, slightly stretched and tinged with emotion: anxiety or perhaps disbelief. Caliph felt trapped, uncertain how to answer. Certainly people were looking for him, probably a great many people by now. Maybe this man worked for the Stonehavian government.

  “I’m a butcher,” said the man. There was no further explanation but his accent indicated a degree of education. His vowels sounded vaguely like he usually spoke Gnah Lug Lam or maybe High Mlk. “Name’s Alani.”

  Do I dare use my name? “I’m Caliph.”

  “There’s a pushing school on the south side of town,” said Alani. “But you’re not going there, are you?”

  Caliph wished he could see the man’s face.

  “I don’t know . . . I . . .”

  “No. You’re headed for that little skirt’s place on the lip of the plateau.”

  “Who are you?”

  Alani stepped back; lamplight caked his face suddenly like butter. Caliph recognized him. He couldn’t find the circumstance but he had definitely seen him before, wearing different clothes . . . a uniform.

  “Turn around. Go to Stonehold.” Then the man shifted position and abruptly walked away.

  Caliph let him go. He was too frightened to run after him. He was still trying to find a setting to pair with the bald head, pocked cheeks and well-kept goatee.

  A thin man in his fifties.

  It had to have been at college. Mentally, Caliph dressed him in baggy pants and a shirt. No. He imagined Alani in Desdae Hall selling books. A professor? A cook? Maybe in town at the theater or Grume’s . . . No. He tried a different angle: who could have known he was going to see Sena? Who would have had access to the letter? Who could have seen the map?

  Caliph searched his mind, trying to remember the faces at the campus post office. All he found were the pouts and freckles of two or three sullen women.

  It seemed useless. Whoever Alani was, he obviously knew both where Caliph Howl was supposed to be and where he was going. Maybe I should turn around . . .

  Caliph stood in the dark for a long time, wondering, doubting.

  Finally he decided. On his first step he rebuked the can that had given him away, kicking it fiercely. It seemed to float rather than fly, barely scraping the bricks before vanishing into the dark. On his second step he set his feet toward the cement steps that led down into Crow’s Eye. He was not going back.

  At a point just north of the barren arches of Tibin, Caliph could see the Walls of Tue, black and misty through miles of humid sky. It was the eleventh of Psh and he had reached the crossroads.

  Sena would have no way of knowing he had stayed another semester. Maybe her invitation had expired. She might even be with someone else by now. The thought thickened the back of his throat.

  Caliph wished he had brought a friend, someone to make it less obvious that he had traveled all this way just to see her. The thought of knocking on her door alone terrified him.

  There was a crumbling thread of trail that climbed from the crossroads up into Tue. When Caliph topped the final switchback, he was gasping. Five thousand feet below, the landscape swept away, creating an indigo vista of lakes and trees. Caliph dug Sena’s map out of his pack and looked at it with some dismay. A nostalgic smile haunted his lips.

  “Can’t draw so well,” he whispered to himself.

  A damp breeze swelled and flapped out of the lowlands.

  Caliph looked up from the crackling paper and studied his surroundings. The sweat from his climb had chilled, inducing vast tracts of horripilated flesh across his arms and back. At least he told himself it was the temperature. A freakish mood had settled, oozing from the angular, purpurean shadows around the Stones. Caliph walked toward them, pulled by an itching in his brain. He touched one like a child on a dare. It felt slick and cool, the crowded patterns stained by an unidentifiable pers residue. There was nothing recognizable in the carvings.
As if the very subject matter were distortion. Flux.

  The air felt sticky, smelled sweet.

  Caliph shuddered.

  Maybe he had heard it: that insane high-pitched gibbering he didn’t want to acknowledge. Whether it really existed or not was a matter he might debate later over pints when the horrible subtlety of the sound had dissolved into memory. For now, Caliph preferred to label it a trick or figment of the wind.

  He left the monument and trudged uphill. A meadow above the Stones tossed mournfully, tumbled down from a small wood that Caliph recognized from Sena’s map. He scanned the trunks, looking for a trail and found one.

  He checked his compass and gripped the paper, wading through the whipping weeds and into the wood. Giant drops were splattering everywhere, on boulders, bark and patches of stony dirt. The warm musty rain assaulted him like soft slimy food hurled in a theater.

  Just ahead, a small cottage came into view and Caliph made a dash for it. Crimson flowers in a barrel drooped darkly by the door. A window had been left open and lace curtains slapped about like desperate fingers.

  Caliph thumped hard only to have the door swing open under his blows.

  He fumbled into a broad kitchen, pungent with spice and tried to shut the door but the latch seemed broken. He set his pack on the table and slammed the sash on the moaning window.

  Caliph wiped water from his face and began winding the thermal crank. After the dials started glowing, he clicked a chemiostatic lantern and held it up to examine the room.

  Delicate chairs and copper kettles poised like swans. A pair of tall soft boots sat crumpled by the door. The cottage smelled of her, but in a dusty faint way. Panning the lantern, he could see that the floor by the window had been ruined by weather.

  “Sena?”

  His voice, coinciding with a blast of wind, seemed to rattle the leaded glass. The cottage was tiny. A brown tailless cat blinked at him from the stairs, but there was something else, something dark and somber on the floor.

  Grume streaked the floorboards, rusty and dry. Caliph found more at the threshold. He backed into the kitchen, feeling the warmth drain from his face.

  Caliph reexamined the front door. The lock had been broken, but the bolt had splintered the frame as though hit from the inside.

  Caliph shook off his queasiness. There was no body. He poked his face above the second floor and peered at Sena’s bedroom, noting the carved headboards. Maybe she’d made it to a hospital in Sandren. Maybe the blood wasn’t hers.

  A deafening crack of thunder split the air just the other side of the roof. Caliph’s body hair prickled.

  The sound of torrential rain on the vague and somehow unsettling geometry of the windows lessened.

  He panned the lantern, scanning the room. His name leapt out from a corkboard in the kitchen. Plucking the pushpin, he quickly read the note:

  Caliph:

  Currently, hospitals employ cytoclastic kymographs. Unless new doctors emerge, redundant therapy heightens egregious symptoms, taking all intrinsic remedies south

  . . .

  The old game. C-urrently, h-ospitals e-mploy c-ytoclastic k-ymographs . . . check under the stairs. He spun immediately, took two steps forward and knelt down.

  A small latch had been cleverly hidden at the corner of the first step. Caliph unhooked it and a crack appeared along the baseboard. He raised his eyebrows, gripped the lip of the bottom step and stood up. The entire staircase rose smoothly into the air like the lid of a counter-weighted trunk. Underneath, a second set of steps descended into a narrow pit lined with mortared stones. He felt immediately apprehensive about what he might find.

  The chemiostatic light spilled like old wash water down the secret steps; it picked out the silver glints of bottles and flasks from the cellar gloom. Caliph swung the hood around and the light lapped over a bookcase filled with volumes, a table cluttered with powders, charcoal drawing sticks and dried roots.

  “Witch.”

  The word came softly to his lips.

  Upstairs, the hinges on the kitchen door creaked in the wind. Caliph paused, listening, but nothing stirred. When he turned his attention back to the table of powdered roots, he noticed The Fall of Bendain sitting in the middle of the workspace with a fingerprint inked in blood in the center of its cover.

  It wasn’t the real thing. She had asked for his forgery of The Fall of Bendain after Roric had left school.

  He picked it up. The blood stopped here. There was a bookmark. He opened to it and discovered that it was actually a note addressed to him.

  He scowled. It was dated nearly a year ago and everything about it was wrong.

  Tes 13, Year of the Search

  Caliph,

  I’m not paranoid, really. This is just in case something goes wrong, which of course it won’t because if it does I’ll probably wind up dead

  . . .

  so this is really pointless anyway.

  Sick, I know. Still, there’s a bit of time to kill out here on the edge of the world especially when it’s been snowing for four days.

  Long waits can kill you.

  I wish it was just the two of us again, battling the brigade of books, picking up the splinters of broken stone noses. For a kiss I’d give my soul.

  Anyway, I’ll probably show this to you and we’ll both laugh. I just thought I should let you know how much I loved you—since I never told you.

  Things slip by unsaid and you regret it later. “Opportunities are the blossoms of seconds,” Belman used to say and “Eternal love orders the heart.” I say: love is the origin of theft.

  —Hynnsll

  Sena had never been sloppy in love. For a kiss I’d give my soul?

  Caliph wrinkled his nose.

  And the Old Speech farewell had been misspelled. ll should have been left uncapitalized to infer you as the person addressed.

  She was fluent in Old Speech and couldn’t have made the mistake unintentionally. She also knew that he had memorized every word in The Fall of Bendain and in the original there had been a paragraph about snow.

  The author, Timmon Barbas had been a general and he had written that long waits will kill a city cut off from its supplies. It was snowing. For four weeks Bendain remained without its provisions. Not four days but four weeks.

  Caliph did not have to second-guess whether she was being clever. This was code specifically for his eyes and it seemed her reason for writing it had been justified. If she had the foresight to write it nearly a year ago she must have foreseen her danger; their last conversation in the attic came back to him.

  What had she been after? A book? The lines in the note were taking form now.

  Just the two of us, battling the brigade of books, picking up . . .

  In the original copy Caliph had quoted Timmon Barbas.

  I wish it was I alone, entrenched in this sorrow, battling the brigade of foes, but alas I cannot do it alone. I am left picking up the splinters of broken bodies and shattered plans of war. For a hiding place I’d give my soul.

  Caliph found the passage on page thirty-one. The words “you clever boy” had been written in the margin and they bracketed a paragraph that Caliph had composed himself.

  In desperate times you must flee and we fled and hid ourselves where none would think—amid the buried dead in the hills. And we ate among the graves and slept amid the sepulchers, regaining what strength we could. And I had but two thousand men left in my army. Two thousand that lived in the hills like dead men. And we were four weeks from home.

  There was the time frame of four weeks again. Caliph riffled through the shelves and pulled down a thin atlas of sorts with crude maps of the Hinterlands.

  Four weeks from home, hiding with the dead . . .

  His eyes ran over the map. There had to be hundreds of cemeteries within four weeks’ travel from here.

  Wait!

  Eternal love orders the heart?

  Belman had said nothing of the sort. His eyes went from the words to th
e map and back again.

  Eternal love orders the heart . . .

  E-l-o-t-h.

  The Valley of Eloth, otherwise known as the Lost Dale.

  The ruins of Esma lay at the far northern end of the valley. A mortuary temple resting above a small lake in the middle of thickly wooded mountains.

  Hynnsll: shade and sweet water. Not a farewell addressed to anyone, left capitalized it formed a description of a literal place: the lake in the woods below Esma. She was alive. That much seemed obvious.

  Caliph felt pleased with himself, pleased with Sena for being so clever and with himself for being equally clever. He had his heading. In the morning, he would set out for Eloth.

  He went back upstairs, pushed the table against the front door and took off his clothes. He hung them over the thermal crank where they dribbled and hissed.

  The dark house, strange as it was, did not threaten him. It was Sena’s house, with Sena’s things, infused with a faint but familiar blend of intoxicating smells.

  Sleeping in her bed, the man’s face mocked him. The one from the train platform; it was supported by the official vest of a courier, the scarlet coat of a doctor. The man wore priest’s clothing, a gardener’s smock. He held a paintbrush, knives, files full of paper. Nothing fit.

  Slowly, Caliph’s dreams shifted, moving from the man on the platform to the soot-covered walls, the brown fans and the running shadows. Once again, the police sabers glittered and the dream man plucked him from the chaos. Then, in dreamlike fashion, Caliph found himself running through the halls of his uncle’s mansion where blood had been so common.

  He woke late, twisted in her sheets, cock stiff, smelling her smell in the linens. He had chased vague dreams of her toward morning.

  Caliph left the loft and found a bite to eat. There was a tin of biscuits in the pantry with a label showing a clown holding a magic wand. A Sandrenese brand he didn’t recognize. More searching produced fruit preserves sealed in wax. He dug into them while songbirds rummaged outside, making music discordant with his thoughts. The cat slept in a patch of sunlight on the floor, its snubbed nose and batlike ears twitched with dreams.