The Last Page ch-1

by Anthony Huso

  David had lost a great deal of weight in ten days. His hair was clumped and tangled up in dirty tufts. His face and neck were swollen and rife with untrimmed growth, a merciful actuality that helped disguise his beaten purple skin.

  A huge black mouse hung like a sack under his right eye and his left hand was bandaged in a way that indicated missing parts.

  David’s voice crackled like paper.

  “Caph . . . Caph . . . is that really you? Is it that bad?” David touched his own face in a gentle vain way. “You’re the king, right? You can get me out of here. I’m sorry. I didn’t know what I was doing. I got . . . I got tangled up in . . . the wrong sorts of people, I mean. I just . . .”

  He was breaking, beginning to mewl.

  “I just want another chance. Just one more chance, Caph. Caph?”

  Caliph held his head in one hand. He knelt before the cage, face heavy, eyes clenched tight. He had internalized his sorrow.

  David gave up trying to speak. Maybe he could see that quite possibly something was about to happen in his favor. He bided his time patiently.

  Caliph was brokenhearted at the sight of his friend. It was true. At a word, the coop would open, his friend emerge, ready to be nurtured back to health. The bruises would fade, the swelling subside. All could be forgiven. All mended. A second chance seemed an easy thing to grant.

  “Caph?”

  “What did you do?” Caliph whispered without looking up.

  “Caph.” David’s voice was pleading. “I . . . I don’t know. I messed up. I already told them everything. The jury said I’m . . .” An additional question, unarticulated but understood, issued through the bars. Aren’t you here to save me?

  Caliph couldn’t look at him.

  “Gods Dave, look what you’ve done! Did you have it all planned? That first day? The day I met you and Sig in the castle?”

  “Mizraim, Emolus, fuck no! I didn’t know. I didn’t have a clue. It’s like I told them, Caph. I’m a sleeper. I’m a crawler, a nobody. This tattoo doesn’t mean shit . . . most of the time.”

  Caliph looked up and saw David pat his stomach. His eyes were red where they weren’t black. They gushed an unremitting effusion of sticky tears.

  “Show it to me.”

  David lifted his shirt. An ugly little curlicue of ink flared above his navel, utterly nigrescent in the poor lamplight. Caliph had not been told about this.

  “What does it mean?”

  “Mean? Caph. What it means is that I’m branded. I was branded when I was twelve. How could I possibly have made a choice like that when I was twelve? How could I have known then that it would come to this? I’m a sleeper. Expendable as toilet paper. One use and pull the chain! I don’t even know enough information to keep from being tortured.”

  “Who did it to you?”

  David’s voice filled with hope. “I don’t know his name. Some guy, tall, pale face, really messed-up teeth. Crazy as a shithouse rat. I think he broke my ribs, Caph.”

  “I mean the tattoo. Who gave it to you?”

  David slumped against the bars, crestfallen.

  “Cabal of Wights. Only I’m not them anymore. They cut me loose like a sturgeon on a three-pound line.”

  “Who are they? Some cult? Why in Emolus’ name would you join—?”

  “Yeah, some cult! Some bad-ass, sacrifice you to the oyster-god cult! I don’t even know where they’re at. I’m the fringe on the lunatic fringe! We’re dry-bottom boys. They don’t tell us shit. I went for eight years not hearing a word, Caph. I swear. Then I meet a man in the street. I could tell right away he was one of the mucks. He was following me around King’s Road by the bistros. Tall, thin. Showed me his tattoo and said I was activated. But all he said to do was make sure the sewer grates in the east garden of Isca Castle were unlocked by noon on the twenty-fourth of Lüme. I swear. I swear I didn’t think that people were going to get hurt.”

  “Then you didn’t think,” snapped Caliph. “And you’re a bigger fool than I thought. I took you in! I gave you money, a job, a place to live!”

  “I was twelve—”

  “Fuck twelve! How old were you when you unlocked the grates?”

  “They would have killed me!”

  Caliph was shouting. “And I couldn’t have protected you? Inside the castle? You provided them their only way in!

  “Forty-two dead! You! You killed them! And now I’m supposed to what? Bail you out? Throw clemency in the face of my judges, the jury, the families of the forty-two soldiers we buried middle of this week?”

  David rested his forehead on the bars. He chuckled softly.

  “Do you remember our freshman year? When we bunked with Roric Feldman?”

  Caliph nodded.

  “Roric used to say the damnedest things,” whispered David. “He used to say to us, ‘Boys, if you fuck a sheep, what’s done is done, you have to shear your kids.’ I guess I fucked a sheep, Caph.”

  Caliph’s heart went limp and cold. He stood to go.

  “Caph, wait. I know . . . I know you.” He bit back on more tears. “I know you can’t . . . save me. But don’t leave me here. I’ll do anything not to spend my last hours down here.”

  Caliph sighed. When he looked at David, trembling, emaciated, holding his butchered hand, he wanted to shout at the guards, call them over with the key, tell them bathetically to let his friend go free. He believed David’s words were true, that he hadn’t thought about the consequences of unlocking the grates.

  Still, the fact remained that after it was done, after it was over, David Thacker had not come bawling like a baby and thrown himself on Caliph’s mercy. No. He had relocked the gates to cover his ass. He had hidden the truth. He had lied.

  “You’ve told Mr. Vhortghast all you know?”

  “Yes.” David’s eyes shone pleadingly.

  “Then I guess we’re done here.”

  “Don’t leave me. Please . . .”

  “Guards!” Caliph shouted.

  “Please, Caph.”

  The soldiers from Gate One came trotting.

  David’s other hand reached out through the bars, catching Caliph’s fingers. The touch was warm and soft. A writer’s hand. Unused to heavy labor. “Please, Caph.”

  Caliph didn’t look back.

  The guards led him away.

  As he recounted his experience Sena shivered. Cameron looked away across the black twist of city far below.

  What have I become? Caliph thought. He knew that it was a question like David’s unspoken question that neither Sena nor Cameron could answer.

  Four days later Caliph went to visit Sigmund Dulgensen.

  Sigmund was appalled by David Thacker’s end, but not in the same way as Caliph. Sigmund didn’t have either the time or inclination to leave Ironside and talk about his loss. He and David Thacker had been proximal friends. Put any physical distance between the two of them and it was like they forgot one another existed.

  A pot of coffee steadily lubricated the snarled calculations of solvitriol power. Sigmund was making headway. He assured Caliph that the lab’s security remained airtight. No one knew about the experiments. He looked giddy to plunge into a full account of his progress.

  “I’m set up with a prototype, Caph.” Sigmund’s eyes were red but exuberant. “Take a peek at this.”

  He pulled out a slender glass bulb haloed in iron, fitted with sockets or prongs at either end. He set it before the High King.

  Caliph gazed at it for several moments, unable to speak. Like a chemiostatic cell the object glowed, but not green or citric yellow. It was not harsh or garish or easy to describe. Unusual pastel colors phosphoresced, crawling behind the glass. They rolled and ebbed along the iron bands, across the polished tabletop. They writhed, mucus pink or yellow ruffling into delicate shadows of lavender and powder blue. It was startling, mesmerizing to watch.

  Caliph picked it up. It was cool, like a chilled wine bottle and tingled in his fingers like the back of a wooly caterpillar.
He almost dropped it in surprise.

  “What can it do?”

  Sigmund was already chewing on his beard.

  “Power a sword indefinitely. Power a fan, an ice maker, a conveyor belt—” He scratched the side of his face. “Whatever you want. Current generated is DC which means we can’t put it through a transformer like they have in the south or carry it very far, but you could hook it up to machines, wire it into a small string of streetlamps and guess what? They’ll never burn out.

  “Enough kitties have gone whee to power a couple city blocks so far. I’ve got ’em stacked in racks down in the lab along with the adapters necessary to plug ’em in for electric lights and shit like that.”

  Caliph nodded, still marveling at the tube of shifting light.

  “Now here’s something that’ll really bake yer noggin. Come with me.”

  He led Caliph down a metal staircase into the gritty squalor of the lab. Huge machines stood rampant, bolted to the floor. Bizarre geometry unfolded like industrial plant life. It moved on heavy hinges by hydraulics or pressurized gas.

  Caliph noticed the rack of additional solvitriol cells Sigmund had mentioned. They scintillated against the wall, a pale rainbow of ethereal colors.

  “You must have found a lot of stray cats.”

  Sigmund shrugged and led him toward two giant anvils of grease-blackened steel. They stood opposite each other, fenced off by chains, and separated by an empty groove of space.

  Like great metal shoes, the anvil-shaped things had been anchored to the floor with massive bolts as well as huge reinforced posts driven many feet into the foundations of the building.

  “It’s mostly solid forged like the bulkheads for the Hylden but each of these were specifically designed to take the strain.”

  Caliph heard an ominous creak deep in the floor.

  “This was our prototype containment housing since the blueprints didn’t go into what we should do if we managed to separate. Now we’ve got something better.”

  As usual, Caliph was lost in Sigmund’s racing dialogue, trying frantically to make sense of parts Sigmund left unsaid.

  “Contain what? Separate what?”

  Sigmund pointed toward the anvils, anchored to the bedrock beneath the building. More creaking sounded from deep in the rock, speaking of enormous forces exerting against the bolts and posts. Caliph still couldn’t tell where the strain was coming from.

  The empty field of space between the anvils rippled with darkness.

  “And what’s that?” asked Caliph, pointing toward the void.

  “Mother of Mizraim, Caliph—what did you hire me for? Solvitriol power, man.” He slapped Caliph in the chest lightly with the back of his hand. “Souls. Remember?”

  Now caliph saw them. At the center of each anvil a tiny window of pastel light gleamed fitfully from a bubble of glass embedded in the steel.

  “Remember how I told you I had some ideas. Stuff nobody else’s ever tried. Well, we built a cold tank like they used in the south to freeze light. That’s how I managed to separate one. I mean that’s how I managed to split a soul . . . in half.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. It’s crazy. You get your arm cut off but not part of your soul. Fucking difficult. Splitting the unsplittable. I ain’t a priest but according to the blueprints souls have . . . high viscosity and they’re independently self-attractive—magnetized to their own unique structures. Shit. They’re indestructible.

  “Anyway you can trick ’em out for a few seconds with devastating cold, plasma diversion I call it, when the attractive charge goes kinda limp. Bottle ’em up like soda pop and put ’em in the containment housing. Whoa! Watch out.”

  A shuddering creak went through the cement floor.

  “We’re going to have to hook up a big-ass crane to pull these little chums apart. Stress fluctuates between the two housings with active torque and an attractive force of not less than twenty thousand tons. That means the little bugger inside the glass—which is holomorphically unbreakable by the way and extraordinarily expensive to make—is actively trying to twist ’round on the bolts, swivel the housing on a path of least resistance back to its other half. We made the mistake of fusing the glass cells with the metal housing in this model. Anyway, not bad for a stray calico, eh? Meow.

  “Now check this action out. Here’s housing number two.”

  Caliph walked toward a table with a strange device on it. A disk of black metal housed a solvitriol cell on either side, back to back, in little cages that allowed the glass orbs containing the souls to turn independent of the metal housing.

  “The whole thing’s made of tunsia but still not as expensive as that huge contraption over there. See this tunsia plate here could probably support almost a dozen tons of force applied to one side but that’s not what’s going on. What’s going on is the thrust of both cells pushing against the plate from both sides with equal force. They actually keep each other trapped and the bulbs are free to spin.”

  Caliph watched the cells revolve slowly, grinding with immense pressure against the tunsia plate between them. They seemed to growl as the soul fragments turned their prisons against the metal disk, furious to undo the division.

  “They can’t try alternate directions,” said Sigmund, further explaining why the second housing worked. “They don’t have any power beyond the holomorphic glass. They can spin the cells, but the attractive force between them isn’t a choice. They’re not consciously trying to meld. It’s just some kind of transdimensional physics, some law that says split souls beeline for one another.” He lifted the plate and spun it in his hands. The soul fragments must have adjusted instantaneously to his sudden dynamics, never pushing in a direction other than toward their better half.

  “What you’re looking at here could be modified, rigged with springs and other power cells, wired up and housed in a solitary casing. What you’re looking at here is the fundamental heart of a solvitriol bomb.”

  Caliph stood speechless, waiting for Sigmund to go on.

  Sigmund smiled. “Yeah. What you do is create a mechanism that allows the two orbs to come together, a hole in the plate or an inclined plane or some shit like that. You can roll ’em toward a point of contact with hydraulics or . . . well I haven’t got that part figured out just yet. But once the glass touches it’s over. Absolute attraction.” He rapped the plate of tunsia. “This is quarter inch. But even holomorphically tempered glass isn’t going to hold split souls a sixteenth of an inch apart. Attraction between the fragments increases to a kind of snapping point. That’s where you get your explosion.

  “Over there,” he shook his hand carelessly at the steel anvils, “you’ve got twenty thousand tons of attractive force. Here,” he rapped the plate, “you’ve got grundles more.”

  “How big?” asked Caliph. “How big of an explosion?”

  “Well . . .” Sigmund seemed to whine as though he had misled Caliph’s imagination. “It’s not an explosion like you’re thinking. It’s a ripple. Like take this beaker for instance.” It was filled nearly to the top with water. He took the top of a bun left over from a day-old sandwich and brushed a rain of tiny dark seeds into the beaker. They formed a carpet along the surface of the water. “Like I said, I ain’t no priest, but let’s say them little seeds is us, suspended in some spiritual layer we can’t even detect. Along comes a solvitriol bomb.” Sigmund let slide a thick drop of water from his finger over the beaker. It fell with a plop, disrupting the surface tension of the fluid, shaking the seeds like beetles from a rug. They fell, floating down into the bottom of the beaker.

  “See, the seeds don’t get blown up. You don’t feel it when a solvitriol bomb goes off. Buildings don’t break apart and go somersaulting through the air. There isn’t any discernable shockwave. But everybody. Everybody falls down.” Sigmund, shirtless in his blackened overalls, scratched his meaty arm while chewing at his beard.

  “Some invisible inexorable tide comes in and washes your soul out of your
body like a mussel from its shell. And you’re dead. You’re meat lying on the bottom of that beaker, nothing left to hold you up,” said Sigmund. “That’s what solvitriol bombs can do.”

  For a while Caliph and Sigmund shared industrial-strength coffee mixed with brandy from Sigmund’s flask. They stared at the tunsia plate separating immeasurable opposing forces and listened to the foundations creak beneath the lab.

  “What’s that dark ripple between the housings?” asked Caliph.

  “The path of attraction,” said Sigmund. “You can’t see it in the smaller housing because the cells are just too close together. But it’s there. Displacing light. That’s all it is. I’ve been trying to find a way to predict how the cells will spin their housing so I can use the path of attraction to calculate some kind of endless cycle, you know . . . like a perpetual motion machine. But it’s still too dangerous to try.”

  Caliph nodded. He asked all kinds of questions. What the attractive force measured at a distance of one, two, even three miles. What the ethereal blast radius of a solvitriol bomb would be. Sigmund had sketchy answers but promised he would do the calculations and get back to him in a couple days.

  Their conversation eventually turned to David Thacker.

  “I would never have pegged old Dave as a traitor,” muttered Sigmund.

  “Nor I,” said Caliph.

  “I suppose when you gathered up his things you found the second set of blueprints.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah,” said Sigmund. “I had David draw up a copy of the plans in case . . . well . . . in case you weren’t shooting straight.” He shrugged. “I just didn’t want you thinking I was planning something behind your back. It was just a safety net, that’s all.”

  Caliph frowned and broke into a sudden sweat. He pushed his alcoholic coffee away.

  “I had . . . I had David’s room searched. He didn’t have any blueprints, Sigmund.”

  Sigmund laughed. “Sure he did. I told him myself to hold on to ’em if . . .” His voice trailed off.