The Last Page ch-1

by Anthony Huso

  After listening to Simon petition for less stringent labor laws and plead for relief from the city’s pollution tax (while professing the indispensable value of Growl Mort’s factories) Caliph politely accepted a miniature factory made of iron.

  The ugly little contraption was bedizened with tiny emeralds in place of windows and contained a chemiostatic cell that made them glow. Caliph felt fairly certain there was some kind of bromidic metaphor going on.

  About clean factories and clean power sources.

  A hidden ampoule of chemical ink and some sulfate, or so Simon explained, was mixed at the touch of a button and produced a soundless but violent reaction that caused black steam to bubble from the smokestacks and dissipate harmlessly into thin air.

  Caliph smiled graciously at the clever but hideous effect and handed the model off to Gadriel for relegation to the hidden stockpile of useless gifts accepted with outward cordiality from the arms of many decades’ worth of wheedling politicians.

  Then, maintaining decorum despite a throbbing headache and exigent need for sleep, the High King accompanied the burgomaster of Growl Mort into yet another lavish parlor where a dozen other guests had gathered for an evening of chamber music.

  Somewhere between the sublime strains of violins, violas and cellos Caliph nearly lost his sanity.

  Though the music dripped with gorgeous sounds Caliph could barely stay awake. The recital ended at sixteen-forty, an hour and a half before midnight.

  Caliph clapped brightly and thanked everyone before the High Seneschal—who must have seen the king’s discomfort like piano wire stretched under his skin—mercifully made an excuse and ushered him from the room.

  “I’m terribly sorry.” The seneschal began a bizarre apology. “They’re usually much better.”

  Caliph waved off the man’s kind but baseless repentance.

  “It’s not that, Gadriel. The musicians were fine. They were wonderful. I’m just exhausted. If I don’t start getting more sleep—”

  “Tomorrow morning you will not be disturbed. I swear my life on it. I will postpone your breakfast appointment until—”

  “No, that’s no good. I need to be there. It’s a very important breakfast. Don’t postpone it. And don’t make the cooks go to any special trouble. I don’t want it to seem like an important breakfast.”

  “Very well.” Gadriel paused at the High King’s bedroom with a strange look of sympathy. His eyes said something like, twenty-six is too young to be High King. He opened the door and Caliph walked in like a blind man, slowly but straight for the bed.

  “Shall I help you undress, my lord?”

  “No.” Caliph fell like a tree across the mattress. He muttered with his face in the comforter, “Wasn’t that miniature factory hideous?”

  “Ungodly,” the High Seneschal agreed.

  “What did you do with it?”

  “I had it melted down for sling bullets and given to the castle children for hunting crows.”

  “Excellent choice. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Gadriel turned down the gas lamp in the room, opened the windows as was his lord’s habit and shut the door as quietly as he could.

  The next morning Caliph waited in the high tower, watching Bilgeburg smolder into another day’s work.

  Sigmund arrived on time and was admitted by the seneschal. He wore grimy leather overalls that had once been mostly tan and no shirt. As usual, Sigmund’s hands looked like he had made a reasonable attempt to scour them and then thought better of it or had been distracted or simply given up.

  “How’s it goin’, Caph?” he asked, slouching into his chair with one meaty arm draped over the back.

  Gadriel made a noise of distinct admonition as he set a tray of pastries and tea on the table. Nevertheless, no visible trace of disdain marred the aged butler’s countenance and Sigmund would have probably ignored him even if there had.

  Gadriel poured each man a cup of tea before leaving the room.

  “It goes,” sighed Caliph. “And it continues . . . indefinitely.”

  “Sounds like I’m glad I’m not the High King,” Sigmund remarked, scooping up two pastries and shoveling one in. It left a puff of cream at the corner of his mouth.

  “I brought a booprints,” he struggled while chewing. His left hand set the other pastry down and rooted around in a filthy canvas rucksack slung over his shoulder and down across his waist.

  Outside, zeppelins were cruising through the striation of vanilla and oyster-colored clouds. They looked deadly. Like ornately finned fish, duny shinquils and coelacanths, that glinted in the high oblique sunlight from the west.

  Sigmund pulled some thickly creased and wrinkled squares of paper out, each folded many times, and set them in a leaning stack beside the pastry tray.

  He smacked down the rest of his breakfast, dumped three spoonfuls of sugar into his tea, stirred, gulped and swished.

  “Thing is, Caph . . .” he dug at some bread trapped in his molars, “this stuff, this solvitriol mechanics. It’s some scary damn shit. It’s no wonder the profs at Desdae couldn’t figure it out even when they got their hands on that little clurichaun. They even had some extra cells taken straight out of Iycestoke but once you crack ’em open the real important stuff, the stuff that makes the cell work in the first place, escapes . . . like light.”

  Caliph reached out and picked up the blueprints. He unfolded them with care. He had still not spoken to anyone about Sigmund’s claim. He wanted to make sure his excitement was justified before he made the secret official.

  On the paper were all kinds of formulae and dimensions. Blocks of information penned in precise handwriting framed by perfect squares and rectangles that hovered around carefully drawn diagrams of tubing and cells of blown glass.

  The cells looked similar to chemiostatic batteries but instead of holding acids and holomorphically charged fluid, the cells on the blueprints contained something called solvitriol suspensate.

  The glass was not normal glass either—something professors at Desdae had already figured out.

  “What’s solvitriol suspensate?”

  Sigmund was about to bite into his second pastry. He reconsidered and set it down, folding his hands and looking suddenly solemn.

  “That’s the scary part, Caph. That’s the scary part.” He dragged his chair around to sit beside the High King.

  “See these caps and tubes and whatnot? These are like chemiostatic junk we’ve all seen before. You know, conducting electricity from the battery out along a circuit to power whatever it is you want to supply juice to? It’s really basic shit. Problem is you lose energy over distance. That’s why it’s better to light a city with gas. Localized chemiostatic cells can take care of a building if the cells are big enough and you want to change ’em out every couple months.”

  Caliph snorted.

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Exactly.” Sigmund shared the sarcasm. “Pulling bolts on a two-ton chemiostatic cell in a zeppelin is bad enough. I don’t want to be the one lugging one out of someone’s basement. But what if you never had to change it out?”

  Caliph’s brow knitted and he bit his lip.

  “I suppose you could find a way to drain the battery and add more fluid, enhance the housing so it could withstand a decade’s worth of acid and—”

  “No, Caph,” Sigmund interrupted by laying his hand on Caliph’s arm. “I mean what if you never had to change it out?”

  “Never?”

  Sigmund shrugged. “At least maybe until we’re all stone-screw dead and the world’s turned into a ball of frozen rock and the sun burns out or falls in on itself or whatever in Emolus’ name it’s going to do. And even then. Even then . . .” His voice trailed off, insinuating the miraculous possibility.

  “You mean these cells are infinite sources of energy?” Caliph’s incredulity showed as he looked at the diagrams.

  Sigmund nodded with an expression of gravest formality.

  “This is it
,” he whispered. “The fundamental shit, Caph. It’s the fuck-all source. The . . .” he shook as though trying to dislodge words from his body, “. . . the . . . panomancer’s dream! It’s shadow matter. Not a gas or a solid or a liquid. It doesn’t have gravity or normal mass. It doesn’t reflect light. It’s un-fucking-detectable.

  “Remember those rumors we heard in the Woodmarsh Building back in Desdae? About how they froze light in a cloud of gas inside some tank in Iycestoke? Coughed up some old magical mathematical formula for ass-puckering cold and stopped a beam of light dead?”

  “Yes. I remember.” Caliph shifted in his chair.

  Sigmund chewed at the hair under his lip.

  “That’s it. That’s how they found it.”

  “Found what?”

  But Sigmund was too caught up in his own theatrics, his own wonderment to slow down for silly questions that would be answered soon enough. He plunged on, heedless of his friend’s new authority as High King.

  “Look at this.” He rifled through the stack of blueprints until he reached the bottom. “Remember me saying how there was a few snatches of coriolistic tech in these plans—not enough to really go on, but . . . ? Well this stuff down here is mostly useless as far as I can tell, but it does hint at what a coriolistic centrifuge might be used for—besides the academic speculation that it’s just a big thaumaturgic reactor that runs off holomorphy to capture energy from planetary rotation.”

  “You’re starting to lose me,” said Caliph.

  Sigmund held up his index fingers like the goal in a mugball game.

  “Okay, let me slow down. What would you do with an energy source that never runs out of energy?”

  Caliph shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose anything. The possibilities are . . . probably limitless.”

  “Exactly. So let me ask you this: What would you be willing to do to make this power source a reality—assuming you had in your service a capable engineer, a man who assured you it could be done?”

  “Are you asking for a raise already?”

  “No, Caph. I’m not talking about compensation here. I’m talking about you personally. What would you personally be willing to do?”

  “Given that I’m not sure what the implications are, that I’m not quite imaginative enough to have already come up with a host of good ideas, I guess I don’t know. Maybe if I—”

  Sigmund clamped his hand over his own mouth as though damming up his frustration.

  “I don’t know!” shouted Caliph. “I studied swordplay for Mamre’s sake. You’re the engineer! Why don’t you tell me what I’d be willing to do if I were you, or better yet, just tell me what in Emolus’ name you’re getting at?”

  Sigmund scratched the side of his neck where some wiry hairs poked out above his overall straps.

  “What I’m saying is that most folks would and have been willing to do just about anything, including locking their conscience in a box and sinking it to the bottom of the Loor. Damn dark nasty shit, Caph. Something like murder. But this is a brand-new kind of murder, boys and girls. Brand shiny new, like a knife you’ve never seen. Like some new torture you’ve never imagined. This is a crime we don’t even have a name for because until those cruel evil bastards in Iycestoke came up with the concept of solvitriol power it wasn’t even possible to perpetrate.”

  Caliph looked at the blueprints, trying in vain to grasp what Sigmund was getting at.

  “You stopped going to church back at Desdae, Caph, so I gotta ask. Do you believe in gods and shit like that? Do you believe in anything after death?”

  Caliph felt himself grow cold and nervous as he had one night in his uncle’s house on Isca Hill. Like the time he woke to a nameless hour in that huge house with the breeze whistling under the sash and his tiny body shivering beneath the sheets.

  The old trees of the mountain wood had bent beneath an autumn gale while distant chanting rose from someplace far away and tugged with it the smell of a dying sea.

  Though his room was dark, Caliph saw the drapery twist by the window and slap against the wall. The servants had gone home for the night. And though some shape of blackness moved within, Caliph knew his uncle had gone abroad and that he was alone in the house on the hill.

  Fearfully, he had sat up and looked out the great window, down across the hills and moors. The glass seemed to melt and the geometry of the window to change. And he knew somehow he was looking south—even though his window faced true north—and that the mountains had fallen away and the seas had dried up and a murrey darkness filled the sky.

  In the distance, on a great tabletop of stone, danced a group of three whose lean, terrible figures reeled around a crucible of gold. The crucible sent flecks of light up like the residual holomorphic effluences out of Murkbell and Growl Mort.

  The figures were blazoned in Caliph’s mind because there was one among them whose legs did not bend oddly like a goat’s, whose arms were not long enough to drag along on the ground. It was he who laughed loudest of all, yelling something about the numbers of the stars, an unmarked tomb and a series of obelisks that would shatter like glass. His voice bounced through the casement, off the flat plateau that did not exist south of Isca Hill. And then, from the darkness near the window had come a deathly utterance.

  “It is him, Caliph. It is him.”

  The speaker’s cold white hand, deformed as a dripping candle, the claw of Marco, his imaginary friend, had rested on his shoulder . . .

  “Caph? Caph are you okay?” Caliph shook his head. “You look a little green. I’m not spooking you, am I?”

  “No. I mean yes, I suppose I do believe in gods and life after death and that sort of thing. Wasn’t that your question?”

  Sigmund nodded slowly.

  “Yeah. Anyway. Like I was saying. That’s good I suppose. Because it means we don’t have to have some big long existential discussion or talk about Ihciva or Ahvêll or whatever else people believe in.

  “We can keep it simple.

  “Solvitriol power, Caph. Solvitriol power runs on souls.”

  For a long time both men sat looking at each other like they had just finished a ghost story on Ilnfarne-lascue. Any minute they expected the other to break the ridiculous solemnity and laugh, point fingers, mock the pale look of terror that painted the other one’s face.

  “What does that mean?” asked Caliph. “It runs on souls?” He sounded like he was trying to fathom some abstruse physics problem. “It burns them up or something?”

  Sigmund’s laugh was sad and forced. He made the southern hand sign for no.

  “Forget the old myths and tales about creatures that eat people’s souls. That’s all crap. You can’t suck up a soul. Well, I mean you can, but you can’t start a soul on fire or digest it or turn it into nothing. It’s indestructible. Eating souls is an ass-stupid idea made up by someone who likes to think about impossible shit for fun.”

  His hand cut a wide sweep in front of him as though brushing away the concept.

  “But what’s the next closest thing to murder, eh Caph? What’s the next cruelest thing you can do to someone?” Sigmund didn’t wait for a response. “Lock ’em away in a cramped tight space, right? An oubliette, a shit-hole dungeon where they gibber for months until they go piss-pants insane. That’s the next closest thing to murder. And that’s what solvitriol power is all about. Plus murder to boot.”

  “I don’t understand. How—”

  “No, look, it’s so simple. So ball-jerking simple.”

  Sigmund stood up and started walking around like Caliph sometimes did, in agitated circles. “You have to extract a soul, right? You have to catch it before it floats away to wherever it floats away to. That’s a whole other topic of debate better left to priests. What I’m talking about is putting a body in a coriolistic centrifuge. Not a dead body, but a live one. Maybe someone sick or old.

  “Then you start the spin. Only the coriolistic centrifuge doesn’t just spin off in the dimensions of known physics. We’re talk
ing about other dimensions here. Branes. Shadow worlds. We’re talking about separating undefined matter from flesh, bones, body fluid, straining off blood and fat. Decanting the soul for Palan’s sake!

  “Look, you stick some poor sod in the tube, spin him ’til he dies and don’t even let him escape. You trap his soul in a holomorphic tube of treated glass before it can slip off to sweet oblivion, plug him into some machine and let him work for an eternity.”

  For a long time Caliph and Sigmund once again regarded each other with an appalled, almost stupefied stare.

  Finally Caliph said, “That’s not right.”

  “No shit it’s not right!” Sigmund was off and running at the mouth again. “There’s this hierarchy thing going on too. Like you could stick a cat or something in there instead of a human, only your results might vary. Half power or quarter power or whatever. I don’t understand how they categorize solvitriol batteries yet but—”

  “Iycestoke does this?”

  Sigmund looked annoyed at the interruption.

  “Yeah. They probably power half the city on it. Like I said, cruel evil bastards. But that’s an ochlocracy, right? Why waste medicine on the sick when you can power a city block on ’em dead?”

  “And you want me to use this in the Iscan military?”

  Caliph’s appalled look did not fade. He began to regard Sigmund with a look of horror.

  “That’s just it, Caph. Like I said you don’t have to use people. You can use animals.”

  “You sick bastard!”

  Sigmund glared. “Hold on—”

  “I’ve heard enough!”

  Sigmund raised his voice in desperation. “Wait! I told you I had some new ideas based on this. Stuff nobody’s ever tried before.”

  There was an urgent knocking at the door. Caliph didn’t even glance at the sound.

  “Look, if what you’re saying is true, if this solvitriol power comes from murdering life and sentencing it to endless enslavement then I’m not interested in hearing anything more about it. It’s heinous, disgusting crap as far as I’m concerned and I don’t want any part of it. Gas and chemiostatic cells are just fine by me.”