The Last Page ch-1

by Anthony Huso

  The fabric had undulated suddenly and something small and freakish had clawed its way into view. A tiny humanlike arm, no bigger than a caterpillar, topped by an infant’s graceless clutching hand. It was white and rubbery, the size of Caliph’s pinkie. Flailing. Twisting free of the ksh’s tight bindings. Squirming for an instant like a grub whose tail had been sutured to Kl’s left serratus anterior.

  Then Kl had drawn his robes together, perfuming the air, hiding the mutant limb under layers of heavily scented yak fur.

  Caliph stood in the shadowy aviary, listening to winged things rustle through the plants, staring out the vast windows flecked with dry urine and birdlime.

  The zeppelins prowled over Ironside, ubiquitous and sullen. He listened to his breathing, smelled the ammoniacal fumes of the birds.

  “Well,” he whispered to himself. “That went well—I think . . .”

  The meeting with the Pplarians had been much briefer than Caliph anticipated; it left him plenty of time to meet with Sigmund Dulgensen.

  He took the Byun-Ghala from its new home in the hangars off the zeppelin deck and plowed east over Temple Hill, passing the delicious smell of the malt house to the south.

  In Ironside, hulls rose like whalebones from outspread keels as workers reinforced the wood with steel. Chemical welders sparkled amid the shadowy strakes and stanchions and partially plated bulkheads.

  Men crawled through a jungle of beams and cables, black as the steel they worked, feverish to outfit warships in case Saergaeth attacked by sea. They ignored Caliph’s zeppelin as it neared a mooring mast over the Glôssok warehouses.

  From here, Caliph could see the huge lacy arches of the aqueducts that ringed the bay. He left the airship for the military labs secreted in Glôssok. A body of armed men wearing barbuts and black leather armor accompanied him.

  He met Sigmund, who had gotten word the High King was on his way, in an observation room overlooking the factory floor. Caliph ordered everyone else out.

  “How’s old Caph holdin’ up?” Sigmund grinned. His hands were black and slippery past the elbows.

  “I’m holding up.”

  “And the funeral?” asked Sigmund.

  “They cremated him in Fallow Down,” said Caliph. His voice was thick and monotone. “They flew him in on a zeppelin. He’s sitting on the mantle in the grand hall. I guess I haven’t wanted to deal with it yet. I tell myself I’m too busy.”

  Sigmund sighed and nodded softly while looking at his shoes.

  “But that’s not why I’m here.”

  Sigmund looked up. “I hope I ain’t fired.”

  Caliph chuckled. “No . . . no, but I . . . I’ve been doing some thinking. I want to give you another chance to explain this solvitriol stuff to me. Please tell me you haven’t told anyone about the blueprints.”

  Sigmund’s face, despite layers of carbon and grease, had already lit up like a welder’s torch. “Fuck no. I ain’t told a soul. What do you want to know?”

  “We’re running out of metholinate. Saergaeth’s cut our supply from the Memnaw and we’re . . . well, I guess you could say we’re close to being fucked.”

  “How much gas we got left?” asked Sigmund, chewing on his beard.

  Caliph heaved a sigh and pulled his hair away from his forehead with one hand.

  “Not much. You’ve probably noticed the city’s pretty dark at night. Most of the streetlamps have been locked off. We can last another month. Maybe two depending on the weather.”

  Sigmund grunted and draped his massive arm over the back of his chair.

  “That ain’t a lot of time, Caph. I’ve got blueprints, manuals, yeah, but I ain’t never built this shit before. You changed your mind about kitties goin’ zip?” He spun his finger in the air to mimic a centrifuge.

  “Give me a break,” said Caliph. “I know you’ve been tinkering. You must have some of it worked out by now—and no, I haven’t changed my mind. It’s still disgusting. But frankly . . . well . . . it’s no worse than most of the other travesties I’ve seen lately.” He bit his lip and shrugged. “I guess we’ll kill some cats.”

  Sigmund chuckled in a vague noncommittal way and took a tin of tobacco from his overalls. He packed his lip and scowled at the taste of burnt oil.

  “Yeah, I guess I can’t fool you. I’ve been tinkering. It’s slow going though. I’ve kept most of my calculations in my locker, got a few tentative mechanisms in there too. But I can’t do much more on my own.”

  “You won’t be on your own. I’m going to put you in charge of a classified department. You can have as many engineers as you need. As much space as you need. Nobody talks. Not to anyone. Everyone reports to you and you report to no one but me. How does that sound?”

  “Fuck yeah.”

  “What do you need?”

  CHAPTER 18

  Due north of Isca the land blistered. Mud pots glopped and farted. They spewed white putty, silica and clay, like liquefied plaster. Beyond them, the green Fields of Gora sprawled inward toward Fallow Down from the sea.

  At Fallow Down, Hitchsum Bridge crossed the White Leech where it swung wide and swift toward Borgoth’s Noose before cutting back into Bittern Moor and slicing south of Bellgrass. The bridge crossed half a mile of gray chop with a wide flat field of sun-bleached paving stones.

  One of only three bridges that could support the weight of Saergaeth’s war engines, it had been fortified with artillery, wired by demolition teams in case of a sudden assault. Overhead, the only war zeppelin Tentinil laid claim to cagily patrolled the area.

  Its captain had good reason to be afraid.

  Mushrooms of orange and green smoke blossomed on both banks, drifting like jellyfish on the breeze. Both sides launched chemical bombs from growling engines that stalked the rivage. Most hit nothing but dirt.

  Roric Feldman had come down to fight, accompanied by a House Guard named Garen and a handful of men. He had convinced his father to let him ride one of three engines patrolling the bank.

  It took twenty men to operate a light engine and fifty for the big heavies (yet to be seen on either side of the conflict).

  Like its zeppelin force, Tentinil had only one light engine. The others had come from Isca, rolling north weeks ago. They guarded the bridges while the remaining Iscan machines stayed behind, shepherding the city from zeppelin attacks.

  Roric’s father was loyal to the High King. He would have locked his own son in the pillory had Roric so much as extolled a single virtue of Saergaeth Brindlestrm.

  But the war hadn’t gotten very bloody—yet. At least not here. And Roric didn’t even consider this fighting. As far as he was concerned, his allegiance to Isca was a technicality.

  He was a voyeur, watching the plumes of poisonous smoke erupt with boyish glee. He stood on the deck of the Tentinilian engine, a small flat space bounded by a single guardrail.

  There were two decks stacked on top of each other, connected by a short series of metal rungs. Heavy armored doors swung open from either deck to allow access to the cramped, dark, hissing guts of the machine.

  Its lower bowels seethed with fulgent coal. Huge swing gears thrust themselves in roaring grease-spitting revolutions. Massive chemiostatic cells pumped blazing green blood through mechanisms linked bewilderingly to brass and steel fixtures on the pistonlike parts of groaning hydraulics. Gauges measured temperature, flow and speed.

  Four great triangular arrangements of toothy wheels pulled the engine forward, laying down a never-ending metal ribbon of blunted blades. The entire engine lifted upward and backward like a boot. As the shift drum turned in some deep sealed transmission, the monster lurched east down the shore, flinging out briquettes of tread-shaped ground.

  The thing was heavily armored, riveted and brown with age. A clutch of heavy pipes jacked backward off the bulkhead behind the decks, coughing blackness into the air. Gun cradles housed massive gas-powered ballistae that fired steel spheres filled with pressurized vitriol mixtures.

  Roric
stood on the top deck, twenty feet off the ground, whooping as the artillery popped from the ballistae and hurtled across the river. On the other side, a violent concussion rent the ground.

  Detonated mud and shrapnel twisted outward like sound. A plume of green mist ripped upward like an irate ghost, screaming silent molecular death to anything in its path.

  Garen stepped out onto the deck, gripping the railing to keep his balance on the bucking, grated floor. He offered Roric a leather mask with a canister snout.

  Roric thanked him at the top of his voice. He wondered briefly what it would be like to ride one of the heavies.

  Saergaeth must have known better than to waste effort on the bridge. Although he was miles away, his troops returned volley with what looked like bored fear, vaguely conscious that one of the canisters might hit them directly.

  They didn’t even aim except in haphazard fashion, eyeballing coordinates and guessing at wind. There was no point. They knew the bridge was wired. Even if they melted the Iscan engines, the demolitions team would ensure they never crossed.

  Besides, Fallow Down was the last bastion of Iscan power north of the river. An entire regiment of men still rebuffed the attack as Saergaeth struggled to secure the muddy ground.

  Roric wasn’t worried. His father had moved a battalion across the bridge, stationing them on the south side, and although he had returned to the town for additional supplies, the danger was minimal.

  For some reason, Saergaeth wasn’t pushing very hard. After Bellgrass had fallen, the renegade king seemed to pause, unwilling to spread himself too thin.

  He’s waiting, thought Roric. Biding his time until his zeppelins are retrofitted for war. By that time, Roric planned to be somewhere else.

  North of the river, over the steep wooden rooftops of Fallow Down, a storm was bloating. A great horn of cloud curved out of the sky, white and gleaming on top, black and treacherous underneath. It spiked down into the ground like a massive rooting claw.

  It had developed with savage speed, tumefying out of nowhere.

  Roric felt the urge for a better view. As his father’s son, he laid claim to more clout than approval but when he asked the commander of the engine to gun the machine for higher ground his request was accommodated with surprising pliancy.

  The light war engine hunched forward as it tore up Dürmth Hill, providing a decent view across the river toward the south of town.

  Trees shattered into pulpy pink blossoms, ripped into hirsute shreds by the huge stuttering tracks. Birds and panicked soot-tails bolted from their hiding places as the machine powered east toward the summit. It hunkered forward on strange scorpion joints against the grade.

  A lone gruelock that had been lurking in a tree swung into a deep ravine before Roric could shoulder his crossbow. Its black furry body swept gracefully through the branches, several arms moving at speed, unaccustomed but shifting nevertheless quickly from the role of predator to prey.

  When they hit the summit, the engine relaxed to a chugging idle, flexing its body back into its usual shape.

  Garen and the commander stepped out onto the top deck with Roric, removing their gas masks in order to talk.

  “Good view,” said the commander. He had to grimace to keep his teeth from chattering with the machine’s pandemic vibration.

  Fallow Down had turned into a tactical maze. All the noncombatants had crossed the bridge south into the High King’s lands or tramped north to side with Saergaeth.

  It was the age-old ugliness of civil war: father against son, friend versus friend. The town’s layout spread old stone and rusty fingers in starfish multiplicity from a central square. It looked squalid and gray, oppressed by the blossoming cloud.

  Roric snapped open his spyglass. Despite the jittering of the deck, he could see troops in the streets and snipers with crossbows patrolling rooftops. To the west, beyond the range of engagement, Miskatoll’s light war engines continued to scud along the bank, occasionally sending a glittering emerald arcing over the river to lift in a puff of poison on the south side.

  The Somber Hills tumbled morosely to the north, already black and sodden under the shadow of the storm.

  “He’s toying with us,” said the commander. “He won’t cross here. Clever bastard’s worked through the mountains. Bendain’s Keep is under siege.”

  Fear leaked like treacle down Roric’s spine. Kennan Keep was next in line.

  “He probably wants the whole string of keeps as zeppelin stations,” said Garen.

  As the men speculated, Roric’s understanding unfolded. If Saergaeth controlled the keeps in the Greencaps, he would control the lowlands as well. His enormous fleet of zeppelins could then pummel the open plains at their leisure and retreat into the crags like dragons to roost.

  “If Caliph Howl ain’t building airships like Mathias Starlet, he’s going to be serving steel wine in Isca.”

  “That’s true enough,” muttered Garen.

  Roric marveled. The fact that Saergaeth was outwitting Caliph pumped a quiet, petulant, albeit vicarious sense of victory through his veins.

  “What the fuck is going on with those clouds anyway?” asked Garen.

  All three men gazed at the horn-shaped storm whose hook had bled in swizzled patterns toward the river. At first it looked like the sky had gone rampage-wild. Weltering in frenzied tumbling gouts like a pot of boiling milk hung upside down.

  The chaos defied gravity.

  Foaming snub-nosed lumps of vapor pushed toward the ground and then retreated, sloshing back into a sky that shuddered like pudding.

  Variegated layers of atmosphere burst like invisible pillows, scattering sudden snow. The three men would have cursed if they hadn’t been so surprised.

  Despite the sudden cold that rolled across the plains at subsonic speed, the air wavered and danced as if through a mirage of heat. Something vast rippled across the sky like momentary circus glass, bending the clouds, warping the structures of Fallow Down like brown kelp.

  Across the river, Saergaeth’s engines seemed to shiver in the cold, wobbling and trembling like metal bees on honeycomb.

  Roric stood at the edge of miles of warped space. It was as if the very air were melting.

  The snowfall rolled and veered erratically as though hesitant to fall. Hovering like ash. A shadow six miles in every direction passed over the ground, sliding from the Somber Hills toward Fallow Down. It cast the town in purple umber and dyed the river muscles black.

  The entire sky thrashed madly for an instant, flailing as though seen through the bodies of a million glass eels.

  The entire crew of the engine, from gunners to coal-throwers to the navigator on the bridge, had crept out onto the decks or pivoted their turrets to watch the display.

  It felt to all of them as if there should have been some nightmare sound accompanying the untoward air. But there was nothing. Just the cold and the quiet. The atmosphere burst with slippery invisible grotesque modulation. It flexed. Rolled. Then suddenly it stopped.

  The shadow evaporated as if the cloud casting it had dried up. The darkness dwindled. The strange convolutions of atmosphere smoothed without a trace.

  “Fuck thunder!” whispered the commander.

  Saergaeth’s engines had disappeared. Fallow Down, the entire mile-and-a-half-wide sprawl of town—everything north of the river, was gone!

  Roric remembered his father and screamed.

  After fifteen minutes of heated debate and speculation over whether the phenomenon had indeed reached terminus, Garen and the commander agreed over Roric’s insistent wail that they might as well throw dice. Nothing either one of them could say made any sense in the face of such an aberration. So they decided to take pity on Roric Feldman and risk an investigation.

  The light engine smashed down the north face of Dürmth Hill at top speed, crashing through bracken, spitting out flinders and destruction in its wake. When it hit level ground the gears shifted and the treads gouged fresh earth, flinging clods as th
e machine barreled toward the bridge.

  Roric wiped tears from his eyes as he clutched a gas-powered crossbow to his chest. He was shaking with horror, disbelief and utter confusion. Garen stood behind him on the deck, holding a bow of his own. The howling pound of the engines made any kind of conversation impossible.

  As they reached the bridge, the treads clattered dolorously and maniacally over the stone, creating such a racket that Roric hung his bow on a steel strut and plugged his ears. It took little less than a minute to cross the half-mile bridge.

  What greeted them on the other side would go down as one of the strangest discoveries of the fifth century. And the strangest part was that there was nothing there. Nothing to catalogue. Nothing coherent to sift through.

  Roric clambered down the two sets of rungs and leapt to the ground. He scoured the area with his eyes, looking for remains.

  Remains?

  What remains? he thought brokenly. There was nothing! The ground in every direction had been pulverized to fine gray powder. Granules actually. Tiny hollow nuggets like blistered pewter. Miniscule ball bearings. Some were fused in clumps. Some were slightly larger, the size of a sparrow’s eye. Roric lifted a handful and let them trickle through his fingers, ugly leaden beads, freezing to the touch. His fingers ached immediately.

  There were still traces of snow, melting rapidly as the summer wind swept in, displacing the anomalous front.

  Roric searched for anything. A filament of blackened straw, a splinter of wood or the blasted fragments of bricks poking out of the sweepings. But there was nothing. Not a grain of wheat. Not a beetle wing.

  As he disturbed the tiny spheres with his hand Roric had noticed the awful withering stench seeping from the ground. It nearly gagged him and he stumbled backward, dropping the bubbled pellets in disgust. He perceived a trace of diversity in the destruction. Here and there the scrap of widespread disintegration had hardened into a grisly yellowish-gray-green and purple crust. It looked like molten slag had cooled into thin metallic plates, pocked and cratered and ugly.

  Roric wept and cursed and kicked about, sending up large clouds of noxious invisible fume. The swath of obliteration centered on the former town and swept its ruin west along the rivage. It had encompassed Saergaeth’s war engines and left nothing behind. Even the zeppelin was gone, dissolved instantly in air.