The Last Page ch-1

by Anthony Huso

  “But how?”

  “I don’t know. Mathematics. Twisted possibilities and time. Your uncle was an exceptional holomorph. Which brings me to the final truth. The reason you’ll think I’m crazy.”

  Caliph waited patiently for the secret to be revealed.

  “You remember Marco?”

  Caliph’s throat tightened on the name. All he could do was nod.

  Cameron’s broad shoulders quivered slightly as he spoke. The muscles in his face strained to control an involuntary spasm in his jaw. “I do too. One night.” He shook his head. “The sooty darkness covering the floor. I listened like a child for whatever woke me.

  “Everything was silent. Everything was still and cold. I remember I looked out into the hall first. Through my bedroom door there was a lone candle. Deformed and melting.

  “I listened to the absence of noise. Turned my head slowly, sensing something there. Watching me. Something soundless. Without the noise of breathing.

  “That’s when I saw it. In the smudgy purple of my own room, the thing in the darkness.”

  Cameron paused, apparently horrified at his own words. Eventually he forged on.

  “His face was white, like wax—hanging eight feet off the floor. A black brimmed hat hid his eyes. But it was the grin I remember most! Fierce. Predatory. Laying bare a set of teeth. Interlocking canines that seemed to laugh without noise.

  “Then it fell backward, the whole phantom, like an anchor, vanishing into the shadows at the corner of the room. It made the drapery ebb like ink.

  “I’ve cried for you, Caliph, when I’ve thought about you, rocked in your cradle by that man. Sung holomorphic lullabies by the necromancer on Isca Hill. His rhymes struggled from your nursery on their own, made nightmares lurch around the yard.

  “You asked me which High King I served. I served King Raymond VII.”

  Caliph sank deeper into a numbing chill. “But. That. Was . . . 1397.”

  “The highest form of holomorphy charged the house on Isca Hill. So high that no one, not even the Shrdnae Sisterhood, dared to move against him. I am a product of Nathaniel’s art.”

  Caliph shook his head.

  “I’m the figure box in math books that can be drawn but not built. Nathaniel built me. The capstone of his achievement. The success story that followed his failure with Marco Howl’s ancient, mutant corpse. He needed someone good with a blade. Someone who could cut through a group of the king’s high guard. He found me in the pages of his own genealogy, brought me back to become a nameless, faceless assassin.

  “And you are something like my great, great, great, great grandnephew: Caliph Howl.”

  Caliph sat in a stupor. The winter morning they had left for Greymoor snapped back to him with clarity now.

  Caliph is playing in the yard when Cameron and Nathaniel exit the house. They look cross with each other. Caliph comes running up to them with a small shout and jumps to the top step.

  “Caliph, settle down,” Nathaniel chides.

  The three of them pause on the front steps while Nathaniel fiddles with something under his cloak.

  Caliph traces his fingers over the massive oak portals with iron animals that stare straight back when Nathaniel turns his key inside the lock. Snow lands on their iron snouts and dusts the steps.

  Nathaniel produces an earthen bowl of some steaming liquid he has sheltered beneath his cloak. He holds it by the lip with two fingers and swirls it gently as though it is a wand.

  A smooth sheet of fluid breaks over the lip and falls, splattering deep crimson across the stone. It melts the feathery flakes at once, drinking them into itself.

  Nathaniel traces a three-stroke design in it with the toe of his boot and says something in the Unknown Tongue. What is left of the clotting fluid in the bowl, he places in front of the doors and with a deathly thin smile walks out into the falling snow.

  “When will we come back?” asks Caliph. His voice sounds oddly muffled under the swirling flakes. He stands on the steps looking down at the warm fluid with casual interest.

  “I told you not to think about that,” Nathaniel snaps.

  Caliph crouches down and touches the puddle lightly with one thumb. He holds it up for Cameron to see, a dark red oval on his young skin.

  “You shouldn’t touch it,” Cameron says softly.

  Caliph shrugs and jumps down the steps with one heroic leap.

  “Why? It’s just blood. We’re all going to die. It’s unavoidable.”

  Nathaniel’s laugh echoes through the snowy forest near the yard. “Speak for yourself, boy.”

  “I don’t think you’re crazy,” Caliph said slowly. “I wanted to see you—” He forced himself to spit it out. “My reasons have changed for needing to see you. I guess . . . I suppose . . . I needed to remember. Everything is wrong. My uncle, my history, this war . . . I don’t like being king. I’m not even sure I like who I am.”

  Cameron sipped his cup and winced. The milk was still hot. “There, you see? The Blue General can be wounded by hot milk.”

  Caliph was glad to chuckle, anything to break the awful oppressiveness of their previous topic. “There’s a lesson there, I suppose.”

  “Mmm.” Cameron nodded and swallowed. “The lesson is . . .” He held his cup aloft. “That the world is made up of very small things. This conversation for instance.”

  He took a somewhat more cautious sip. “If you don’t like being king, run away.”

  “What?”

  Cameron nodded. “I’m serious, run away—you’re king, what are they going to do to you? It’s a small thing. A little choice you wake up in the morning and make. Pack a sandwich, walk out the gates and head in any direction you want. I did it once.”

  “I can’t believe this is the advice you’re giving me.”

  “It’s not advice,” Cameron corrected, setting his cup down with a clink. “It’s the way it is. You can just as easily stay. Every day you have the same choice, leave or stay. Either way, do what you have to. Don’t run this kingdom because you feel the weight of a million sheep farmers on your back. They will survive with or without you.”

  “Tell that to the ghosts of Fallow Down.”

  Cameron picked his cup back up. “Tell me, do you think you could have saved them?”

  “I had no idea such a thing could even happen. It’s completely beyond anyone how or why—”

  “That’s right. This kingdom will go on living and dying with or without you. Those farmers beyond the city wall are just as much alive as you are and they have their own ideas. They don’t sit around hanging on every word the High King speaks. A country is made up of millions of people who do what they please. They can manage. Buying. Trading. Feeding themselves.”

  “They depend on me for protection.”

  “They depend on the king—whoever he is,” Cameron said bluntly. “Not you. If you left tomorrow there would be a new king. This kingdom will not fold up and blow away if you walk out that gate. These people are too stubborn for that.”

  “You think I should go?”

  “I am telling you that nothing in this life is big enough to imprison you. You decide.” He downed the rest of his milk. “Who’s the girl?”

  The shadow in the doorway drew back, then paused.

  Caliph did not see it and asked, “A servant didn’t see you in?”

  Cameron poured himself another half-cup. “An armed squad of soldiers saw me in. The woman I met in the hall was no servant.”

  Caliph sank back into the cushions with a faint sound.

  Cameron cleared his throat. “Never mind. The High King’s business is his own.”

  “No, it’s all right. The whole city’s gossiping. They think I’m as bad as my uncle. According to rumor we prowl the graveyards at night and mate in the mausoleums when Lewlym is full.”

  Cameron smiled and nodded as if this too were news he had already heard. Caliph wondered if Cameron had taken his time coming to the castle so that he might arrive armed
with every bit of gossip, already informed of how the Duchy squared.

  “She seems . . . pleasant.”

  Caliph picked up his goblet and took a sip. “Her name is Sena. She’s dangerous. And I love her.” He tilted his goblet all the way back.

  Cameron smiled faintly. “Love asks no questions. But a king should. If you decide you want to be king.”

  “Gadriel would like you,” Caliph mused. “The seneschal,” he explained. He pressed the cork into the bottle.

  “He must like balding goatherds.” Cameron grinned.

  The shadow in the doorway slipped away.

  CHAPTER 24

  One of those interminable midsummer months without holiday, Streale came in swullocking and threatened more heat before autumn finally drained it like an insatiable leech.

  Beneath smazy yellow skies, the city continued to seep fermenting juices from its cracked and crusted hide. Strange urban smells lifted with the trill of popple bugs from city parks crammed under aqueducts or wedged between museums and tattoo parlors.

  The economy crawled along like a half-butchered thing, cowed and wounded by the encroaching war. Grocers ran out of canned meat and powdered milk and chemiostatic torches. Construction workers abandoned the skeletons of new buildings whose funding had gone slack.

  Despite the unrest, Sena needed to get out of the castle. The Hold was still relatively safe. She dressed in simple clothes and took a full purse of money.

  Accompanied by two watchmen in casual attire she sampled fruits, pawed through racks of outlandish clothing and drank coffee at a chocolate house on King’s Road.

  On a whim, maybe to spite Megan, she decided to try one of the bright dyes she had seen in cafés and bookshops in Octul Box.

  There were pinks and flame orange-reds and deep purples to choose from.

  After a stylish cut she settled on blue, just a stripe. When the beautician was done a single whip the color of sky lashed from Sena’s crown down along the side of her cheek. It matched her eyes perfectly.

  Just a few more weeks, she promised herself. Then I’ll put away this nonsense and open the Csrym T.

  She couldn’t explain how it had disappeared and reappeared any more than she could explain how the Wllin Droul knew she had it. Everyone assumed the attack on Isca Castle had been an attempt on the High King’s life, an effort at a coup. But Sena knew the real motive behind the onslaught and her knowledge made her danger and her fear hugely personal and close.

  If she hadn’t been unbearably weary of the castle she wouldn’t have risked the outing in Octul Box. But she was weary. She needed this.

  Humid warm and strangely sweet, the smells of pollution cloyed in alleys trickling away through the Hold where fourteen-year-olds bragged about theft, sex, violence and their evasion of the law. They carved at their egos with knives, whittled heroic icons of themselves from the flesh of their rivals.

  They ogled Sena like meat.

  Sena’s Hjolk-trull heritage kept her physically analogous to their age. Somewhere between nineteen and twenty-three. Not that it mattered. She turned plenty of heads regardless of age.

  The boys followed her all day, slipping over walls, staying a safe distance from her bodyguards.

  She watched them furtively as she went about her shopping. The papers had brought them to her attention. Some called them lice; Sena could tell from their bold propositioning stares that they did not read the papers.

  They sculpted their own myths from words taken out of each other’s mouths, fashioning from a crude alternative lifestyle something legendary and remarkable. Worm gangs. Their language was an arrogant gutter dialect of Hinter mixed with Trade. She could hear them making catcalls.

  The stories in the papers were linked to her, which was why she had taken notice. They described how the worm gangs stalked the paths of the streetcars behind terminals servicing the District Line, where rails squeezed through dangerous territory.

  By the end of Lüme their bodies had started to surface at an alarming rate. Behind sagging warehouses and fences, where fans spewed hot greasy exhaust from rathskellers and sleazy bistros on the Line, the bodies of Isca’s next crop of highbinders had begun to pile up.

  The Herald also claimed that when the watch found them, they usually made no report. It was part of a conspiracy theory: letting the carcasses melt in with the rest of the city’s refuse, a kind of victory said the Herald; some vague proof of a self-destructive and deviant lifestyle.

  These accusations against the watch pointed up through the food chain at Caliph Howl . . . and Sena. Professors of subcultural anthropology had reported their findings in a school-run, politically boisterous sheet published at Shaerzac University in Gas End. But the professors weren’t content with small scale distribution. They took their story to the Herald and cried murder: a distinction not endorsed by the city watch.

  Now the Herald was labeling the homicides with bold letters at the top of the second page: BARRAGE OF HATE CRIMES AGAINST INNER CITY YOUTH. There were demonstrations on campus that accused the High King’s witch.

  NO WITCHCRAFT EXPERIMENTS! shouted poster boards. The students and faculty compiled all kinds of debatable evidence that slithered loosely into one of several favored conspiracy theories.

  Popular opinion in Gas End had begun to wane and chants of No War! and Council or Saergaeth! echoed across the south greens of Os Sacrum.

  Sena finished her shopping and returned to Isca Castle troubled and tired.

  Zane Vhortghast had suggested making an example of the loudest mouths, but Caliph adamantly refused any kind of censor. He knew the claims were baseless and therefore ignored them despite a growing host of accusations.

  Mr. Vhortghast, however, would not let it rest.

  He knew something had to be done. The city was getting out of hand and with war creeping south along the mountains, and a gathering of nervous burgomasters watching Isca Castle, the spymaster had taken matters into his own hands.

  Dressed his best and brandishing a cane, the spymaster had paid a visit to each of the executive editors, publishers and chairmen of the six main papers . . . at their homes.

  Zane Vhortghast knew them all on a sordid, personal or compromising level. Shame, avarice and fear were well-worn tools in his hands and knowing which ones to use when and on whom comprised the bulk of his considerable expertise.

  “I’m not asking for complete censorship,” Mr. Vhortghast would say in a reasonable tone of voice as he poured himself a drink. “Just a bit of discrimination.”

  And then, in the corner of the room, something would quiver and nod its head in lamentable deference.

  Fanatics who refused to capitulate, like Dr. Frezden, had accidents that underscored, in red, the importance of adhering to new journalistic standards.

  By the end of the first week of Streale the demonstrations in Os Sacrum hadn’t lost their pitch but papers citywide were suddenly casting Caliph Howl and Sena Iilool in a much more empathetic light.

  Caliph, unaware of the circumstances responsible for the change in tone, read the Herald—utterly bemused.

  Zane Vhortghast was a busy man that week. He closed up shop in Ghoul Court and let slip that Peter Lark had gone south, searching for greener pastures.

  The apartment building he had lived in conveniently burned to the ground, taking the landlady (who had seen him without his disguise) with it to a stinking, smoldering grave. A bird-duffer and a half-slopped chirurgeon also met seemingly unrelated accidental ends.

  With the coming cleansing of the Court it was Zane’s last chance to tidy up. Caliph’s raid would be no less than devastating and there was little use in being diplomatic anymore.

  Caliph talked with Cameron and Sena in the evening, exhuming additional childhood stories around the darkened fireplace in the grand hall. The city remained candent long into the evening while buzzing metal fans sucked humid shadows into the castle, across the faces and legs of the chatting friends.

  After dusk they d
ecided to go for a walk on the upper parapets. Caliph relished these spare hours because the days were so busy.

  Caliph leaned heavily on the battlements, exhausted. He talked about his visit with David Thacker while Isca’s mythic nightscape did little to comfort him. Chimeric gears and water towers enmeshed steepled roofs and smoke. With Sena and Cameron, he watched the city’s slow dark rhythm of streetcars and zeppelins evoke to the sounds of bells floating out of dreamholes on Incense Street.

  It hadn’t happened on the day he wanted it to. Things had come up. But by the ninth Caliph had finally made it down to the dungeons.

  There had been a hearing, a jury, a verdict and so on. It had happened quickly in a system without the possibility of appeal. No one was surprised when one of the papers offered a litho-slide that showed the traitor’s face and the brassy headline: FRAT BOY GETS DEATH.

  The Iscan Herald was superficially more tactful, its caption debatably less sensational: MORE BAD NEWS FOR KING HOWL. Both papers were careful to downplay the relationship between the High King and his former friend. They gave Caliph the benefit of the doubt.

  Strangely, the same image of David Thacker had made its way into the hands of every major columnist and hatchet man the city over.

  Caliph recounted his journey to the dungeons as he walked around the patio. The humiliation, the close, fetid air shuddering with moans and broken sobs. Unidentifiable scratching sounds and insane gibbering in the dark.

  “It was awful. Some of those people have been down there since before I graduated Desdae.”

  He recalled how those sane enough had pled for mercy, how others swore and spit and how several bone-thin crazies on seeing him had palmed their genitals and danced.

  He had breathed through his cloak in an effort to stifle the smell. Despite the horror, it was only a short walk to David’s cage.

  When he arrived he looked around, confused, wanting desperately to be mistaken, to find the unscathed face of David Thacker somewhere else.

  Caliph set the lantern down and fairly crumpled to his knees before the effigy of his former friend. All his anger abandoned him. He began to sob, a dry-throated hysterical silence that dredged out his soul.