The Last Page ch-1

by Anthony Huso

  The city watch now recognizes the Lua’grc half-breed spies. The mucks are of no further use. So they are eaten, bones and all, rich nutrients ingested, the blubber and talons of the cannibals fortified preparatory to the journey ahead.

  Only the flawless survive.

  But they are not a vengeful race. For them, carnage is holomorphy, tactics and something close to joy or delight. They have no rituals for their dead, no tombs or graveyards. The dead are eaten without thought as a matter of course.

  Sena watches through the wall, and begins to understand them as the flawless grow fat and sink from Ghoul Court into deep reservoirs and cold abyssal bourns that gush or leak south below the world crust. She begins to understand them as ancient organisms that follow routes like salmon where the water has not seen sun for many thousand years.

  The Lua’grc abandon Old Duny’s brumal backwash, migrating south into less frostbitten waters. Sena sees them course through tunnels across the convoluted miles. Under the continent’s blind-making shadow, their journey will take several months to complete. But Sena has read about them, knows that eventually they will find their way by touch or sense of smell or some more primitive perception no human ecologist has ever catalogued or named.

  In the end, the legendary Seas of Yloch will welcome them home; they will pour their bodies in, mingling with slurry spilt from culverts older than the Duchy of Stonehold. They will drizzle out of sewer systems designed by the slaver race before the advent of the hexapala’s eight thousandth year. And for a while they will be at home in olden structures built up in the deep, waiting for word to come from lung where the last of the true Lua’grc, the last of the true flawless dwell.

  So this is what it’s like, she thinks. This is what it means to be Sslîa . . .

  Sena orders a servant to buy two crows in Octul Box and bring them to the high tower garret. It is time she did something. Stonehold is the only place she has to lay her head and she knows acutely, since rifling Lewis’ brain, that Caliph is not winning.

  The black wisp of soot that haunts her, tells her what to do. But first, like all good holomorphs, she decides . . . she insists on running a proof.

  Sena locks the door. The servant has come and gone. A large cage hanging from the rafters contains a pair of rooks. They blink angrily and grouse for space. They will save her badly bruised eyes; she has left the shylock in her room.

  As she moves, the birds’ agitation increases. A sporadic drizzle of sable feathers touches the floor. She does not attempt to soothe them.

  She stands before a blackboard and makes the calculations, scribbling out the numbers she will translate into words. As the chalk moves she begins to whisper, the sky outside begins to turn. Her eyes notice it as if from miles away, vast gouts of chocolate stratosphere and sapphirine vapor rotating like toilet water centered on Isca’s tallest spire.

  She sees the streets, the pavement nymphs and worm gang members and gadabouts from Winter Fen to Ironside who stop to marvel at the snail shell of cloud. But when little fingers of lightning begin to play the city’s cables like discordant strings, when the lines that carry short supplies of power begin to lap the wind and a fine gray sleet begins to fall, she sees the rubbernecking end. People run for cover.

  Sena opens the Csrym T. Her vocal cords are incapable of pronouncing any of the Inti’Drou glyphs. She must dilute them, take parts of them and transpose them with the Unknown Tongue. Something she can use. Even so, its primacy is extant.

  She speaks a word and both rooks die in an explosion that splashes the floor. Her tongue moves, knocking out words made of numbers made of blood. They are brighter and darker than the Unknown Tongue. They are smoother. They are pure. She cannot reduce them further any more than she can use a stick to draw a sunset in the dirt.

  Her incantation pours several different algorithms into one; then puts her argument in place.

  It is a proof so she follows all the rules, doesn’t cut corners, makes everything painfully clear.

  The test she has chosen is the equivalent of tipping a dart with an unknown chemical and hurling it at a creature in a cage. After it is done, she will wait and watch, morbidly, because she doesn’t know exactly what the Csrym T’s concoction will do.

  Her conscience troubles her minutely in a purely scientific way. She has to know. So she aims her missile at a seemingly overeager volunteer, a target she has been saving all her venom up for years.

  Sena speaks and her lips launch the invisible and ancient bolt, hurling it beyond the Greencap Mountains, across the Valley of Eloth, into the Country of Miryhr. Her aim is perfectly precise, pointed at a parody of family that has so often made her choke. With long-anticipated retribution, with angst grown bitter as a root, she spits her dart at Megan.

  Alani knew everything.

  He knew how carefully Caliph had planned this war. He knew how the bodies from Ghoul Court had been dressed in zeppelin uniforms and laid at the site of the Orison’s crash. He knew how the timing had been so critical, perfectly synchronized with the departure of Bjorn Amphungtal’s airship from Isca. King Lewis could be arrested and imprisoned but Mr. Amphungtal was a diplomat: far beyond the reach of Stonehold’s criminal system. He was untouchable.

  Alani imagined Amphungtal’s smile as he bid Caliph good-bye the evening before his flight left. How he must have relished the fact that the blueprints had been recovered, that Caliph Howl was doomed and that he, Bjorn Amphungtal, was escaping via airship just before calamity struck! But such was not the case.

  In clear dawn, Mr. Amphungtl’s zeppelin was brought down under a hail of gunfire. Its gasbags were rent. Its luxurious cabin was riddled with holes. It crashed near Clefthollow in broad daylight to the amazed eyes of townsfolk and soldiers stationed below. There were no survivors.

  The news rocked the Duchy and spread south: that a Pandragonian ambassador had been fired on, murdered as the papers said, killed ruthlessly and illegally by a Stonehavian airship. But the airship that killed Mr. Amphungtal was not part of the High King’s fleet. It was a sky shark flying the colors of Saergaeth Brindlestrm.

  Alani smiled.

  Caliph had made it impossible for Pandragor to publicly support Saergaeth in Stonehold’s civil war. He could do nothing about the munitions and supplies that the Pandragonians had already delivered, but there would be no southern zeppelins in Saergaeth’s fleet. The war was back to being fair. As fair as it would ever be.

  Alani and his men had landed behind enemy lines after shooting down the southern ship and moved swiftly to the next stage of Caliph’s multiphase plan.

  But despite Alani’s pride in a mission well done, when he reached Miskatoll, his hope faded. Like reading ahead in a novel, he knew what was going to happen. He could skip all the intervening chapters of pointless violence and exposition and know with the solid assurance that his many years of experience provided, that nothing Caliph Howl could do would change the inevitable.

  Alani omitted this grim personal assessment in his note to the High King and wrote simply that he had discovered the date and time of Saergaeth’s main attack. He sent this (and only this) information back to the High King.

  Caliph received the note within two hours, pulling it from the exhausted hawk’s leg. Alani had cranked the tiny golden screws on the chemiostatic governor in its brain to maximize speed.

  Day after tomorrow, read the note, second of Thay. Saergaeth will be coming.

  Caliph’s eyes wrestled with the crumpled hazy darkness of the western mountains at the limit of his sight. He took tablets from a red-coated physician on the Byun-Ghala who assured him they would moderate the pain. He chewed them like candy but his discomfort never flagged. His stomach gurgled with acid.

  He was headed home.

  After visiting his generals, ferrying the prince to Tentinil, completing a long schedule of meetings, Caliph was finally headed home. He had made every decision he could make.

  He shredded the note from Alani in his palm and let it f
all like the first snowflakes from the Byun-Ghala’s outer deck.

  The zeppelin powered south, clearing a geothermic swamp and gliding over a jumbled pile of hills gone bald with autumn brown.

  In the fast-moving zeppelin, the landscape never stayed the same. The drumlins that had just replaced the swamp receded in minutes like diseased gums, exposing the blackened incisors of Murkbell and Growl Mort, basking in their own slaver by the sea. The industrial districts offered drooling abscesses that outpoured spew as yellow as infected pus. Caliph could see the grime-encrusted seawall, the arches of the great arcade. Like a sleeping dark but restless thing, Isca seemed to slither into view. But Caliph didn’t wonder if it was worth saving.

  The Byun-Ghala motored in quickly and moored on the deck at Isca Castle. He instructed Yrisl to deploy all remaining engines on the city’s western flank. Not the trundling lightweights . . . but the juggernauts. The big heavies.

  As the airship docked, Yrisl jumped the gap, not waiting for the plank, and ran without pretense to obey.

  Caliph did wait for the plank. He was exhausted and wanted only one thing: two hours. Two hours of sleep.

  He headed to his room.

  When he entered he found Sena looking wild.

  She was draped in the tub, hair pulled up, covered with bubbles, cradling a bottle.

  “You’re late,” she slurred.

  “Really?” He pulled off his gloves and boots. “By whose clock?” He had already noticed her eyes.

  “Mine.” Her voice was repugnantly wanton. “Come fuck me.” The bottle slipped, disgorged its blush into the bath.

  The radiator was boiling and the bedroom felt like a roasting pit. Caliph pulled off his coat. He twisted a knob that isolated the room from the rest of the boiler’s circulatory system.

  Her eyes!

  Caliph walked toward the tub, speechless.

  They were dazzling and awful. Ringed with bruises and glowing in shadow: molten blue. The closer he got the more he saw, little flashes, tiny engravings that caught the light. They were exquisite, without a pupil. Pure blue. The iris had grown shut. Caliph was horrified. Her eyes looked like jewels.

  Sena stumbled from the tub. She nearly fell but Caliph caught her by the arm. Her towel hung from a nearby chair. He jerked it free and draped it over her shoulders.

  She bit her lip as if in concentration and made it to the bed.

  Her body smelled of perfume, soap and wine, glossy with the creamy lace of bubbles gathered on her skin. Her form unrolled, escaped the towel’s rubric. Caliph gazed at the gleaming provocative compilation of her parts. He felt disjunct, as if part of him was still standing on the Byun-Ghala staring at war charts. But her topography mapped a place far removed from anything that reeked of war. A rolling golden landscape. Left shoulder dipping sleekly into waist. The supple hollow where her skin grew taut across the pelvic arch.

  Caliph ran his fingers over her. She stretched at his attention, slid her legs along each other with the soft whisper of skin.

  Maybe in the morning she wouldn’t remember him kissing her like he was starving for her mouth. Maybe in the morning they would talk and sort things out. She wouldn’t be drunk. She would explain her eyes. He would apologize for leaving her without good-bye. Maybe she would forgive him and he would forgive her and she would tell him, finally, that their love wasn’t something base; that they weren’t just a pair of junkies whipped by what they craved or a set of people using one another for comfort or power or anything else.

  Caliph trembled and held her like something on the verge of being lost, like something irreplaceable that he couldn’t save or hold onto tightly enough. Afterward he cried.

  CHAPTER 39

  Sena woke up alone. Meetings and war formed her primary suspects. She didn’t bother getting out of bed.

  Last night remained a blur. She smiled, pulled a heavy shadow toward her and opened the Csrym T. The day passed quietly with the knowledge that she had sent an ancient ball of blackened numbers like a meteor into Skellum Hall. If Megan couldn’t or wouldn’t do it, she knew the Eighth House would soon dispatch a qloin. Retribution was inevitable.

  During the past few days, Sena had killed things, used a vast amount of holojoules to drape the castle in a veil. Her eyes could not penetrate the Eighth House and she hoped the inverse was also true. She kept the shylock close at hand.

  In the evening, a servant brought her dinner and a bottle of ridiculously expensive sherry. She hardly touched the meat. She took the bottle to the window and stood looking at the distant west. Since she had been in Lewis’ head, tenuous loyalties had begun to blossom in her chest, something she had never felt before, a weak and unfounded brand of nationalism. It seemed ridiculous. Her allegiance had always been to no one but herself.

  She flicked her kyru out, cut the foil below the lip and popped the cork. The smell of Stonehold wafted from the bottle’s throat. She wiped the top and poured a taste of her new country, her new home.

  Her eyes clawed through the mountains—past the war, but parliament, all of Skellum, remained dark. She could sense the chaos, sense the Sisterhood changing hands. She guessed her proof had been a raging success. Now all that remained was to find a way to use what she had learned to help Caliph win this war!

  Sena swallowed two ounces and poured herself another glass. Stonehold will be my home, she thought.

  A shadow in the room whispered to her, urging her to lug the Csrym T from its perch, open it and begin to read.

  That night, winter fell like an anvil. From Kjnardag’s glittering slopes a cold snap stabbed south and crackled in the Iscan Bay. Snow descended. A parasitic host bedaubed the north with grotesque white.

  Cold inveigled every cranny of the city. Steeples, bathrooms and bedrooms of the poor became its nests. Buckets of frozen night soil were tossed from door stoops of tenements devoid of plumbing. They bobbed, half cones of solid filthy ice, thudding dully along fouled concrete tunnels. The watch dumped chemicals in the sewer to keep them mostly liquid.

  Caliph looked out from his study windowsill that had draped impossibly during the night. All across the skyline surreal sculptures drooled, white as frosting, defying gravity in a bake shop of the mad.

  As predicted, when Isca’s stench had been dulled by snow, when things seemed almost sanctified and suddenly still, all-out war erupted on the western plains.

  Word reached Caliph for the second time, a correction from Alani confirming that airships were lifting out of hangars in the border keeps far away: one day early. Irony of ironies, he attended one last meeting. Then, by hawk and word of mouth, he disseminated to his generals the signal that would finally put his plan in motion.

  He felt numb.

  Vaguely, he became aware of transitions taking place in the streets below the castle.

  People couldn’t flee. Instead, they braced themselves and hunkered down, cracking un-laughed-at jokes in order to distance themselves from outright hysteria. He could see Octul Box from the parapet, where grocers’ shelves sold bare by half past six and storefronts closed as owners hurried home.

  People changed. Priorities about-faced. There were no demonstrations at Shaerzac University, no more antiwar sentiment in the major press. Zeppelins. A countless host of zeppelins was coming and everybody knew it. Chemical bombs would fall on the capital of Stonehold, on Hullmallow Cathedral, on Cripple Gate, and Dmlt Hall. Terror and destruction would mar the ancient statues at Shaerzac University and kill the helpless in the slums of Gorbür Dyn.

  Of course there were factions that still insisted a peaceful transfer of power could be achieved through several rather optimistic channels. They published rushed articles in flyers and held rallies in tiny bistros with an attendance of half a dozen souls. But their rhetoric had become the lunatic fringe and it drowned quickly in the tumult of a rising indignant mass. People were incensed by Saergaeth’s attack.

  How dare he? How dare he attack Isca! The capital of Stonehold?

  While
the citizenry of Isca voiced their outrage, the military turned abstract anger into tangible force.

  Caliph left Isca by zeppelin at seven fifty-six on the morning of the advance. He and a crew of twenty airmen headed west.

  Boys in black flight uniforms tumbled across the decks, winding up the nickel-plated Pplarian guns. They adjusted slides, bolts, and loosened various clamps with ratchets, pulled safety pins that prevented rotation and fine-tuned a variety of other obscure settings on the clawlike turrets.

  Caliph had sent word to Kl, thanking him.

  Kl had sent eight strange cannon that Caliph divided judiciously among Isca’s fleet of forty. One he had harnessed to the Byun-Ghala. The rest he placed on his fastest ships.

  Their long slender barrels gleamed with alien elegance, vaguely phallic. Glittering hoses coupled compression units to six-inch bores that conducted a unique shell down the weapon’s length.

  Ammunition was limited.

  Twenty shots per gun. The shells, like strange silvery seeds nested in racks to the loader’s right flank. Pointed at both ends and screwed together at their meridian, the shells were designed to break in halves after launch. Once the twentieth shot was fired, the cannon would be reduced to decoration, worthless until more of the special ordnance arrived.

  Unfortunately, brigs from Mortrm had sunk a Pplarian frigate carrying just such a load. A second shipment was not likely to arrive until the war with Saergaeth had become a matter of historical debate.

  Caliph gazed at the twenty alien bullets with a sinking feeling. He wasn’t counting on one hundred sixty Pplarian shells winning this war.

  The Byun-Ghala slid west, following the Trill Hills that separated the mud pots to the north from the village of Burt. A thousand feet below and receding fast, brown lanes chugged with gray shapes. Steam engines, horses and carriages. Small platoons of local men stood in formation in the village square.

  Caliph aimed one of the railing-mounted spyglasses and discovered they were armed with swords, pitchforks and probably a handful of chemical grenades. They were local militia lacking uniforms or armor. Some of their fellows loped along trails presumably hidden at ground level, darting under leafless trees that hardly camouflaged them from the sky.