The Last Page Page 7

  When he finished, he cleaned up and looked at the map he had torn from one of Sena’s atlases. Eloth was four weeks away if he walked, but he had found some money in her desk to help with train fare and there was a horse stabled out back that he could ride to Crow’s Eye.

  What am I doing? I should go to Stonehold . . .

  Outside, the late morning sun steamed dew into a sultry fog around the house. Insects were crooning but the songbirds had vanished. Caliph picked up Sena’s cat and stepped through the back door, not looking at the gruesome stains on the threshold.

  “You’re thin as a stick,” Caliph whispered to the animal. “I can’t very well leave you here to starve.” The garden behind the house had grown into a jungle. Enormous pink and orange speckled blooms hung in the tangled foliage, humming with blue bees. Caliph fought his way to the fence line where a solitary horse grazed near a steaming pond. There was a shed nearby with tack and harness. He set the cat down on the split-rail fence and opened the door.

  “Horse thief.”

  Caliph stumbled backward. Crouched on her haunches atop the shed’s small peak was a woman in dark clothing.

  The soft impact of another woman embraced him from behind. Her body was close, her arms cradled him strangely. There was a knife, curved perfectly against his throat, a razor choker that warned him not to move.

  From the flowers another woman appeared. She too had dark clothes and like the one on the roof, there was something strange about her eyes. They glittered profoundly, as if faceted by a jeweler’s chisel, liquid flickers of light scintillating while they watched him.

  For a moment, only the insects trilled across the breezy green shapes of the forest. Caliph blew a mosquito from his lips but couldn’t speak. The knife around his neck was too tight.

  “He doesn’t look like he belongs out here,” said the second woman. Then a voice behind his head said, “I’ll bet he knows her.” She was talking into his ear now. “You came out here for some fun, didn’t you?”

  Caliph still couldn’t answer. He held these women up to the memory of those he had seen at Sena’s graduation.

  “What are you doing here?” asked the one on the roof. Then she spoke in a language Caliph couldn’t understand. Instantly the pressure on his throat lessened.

  “That’s the important question.” Her voice was calm and pleasant as it shifted back to Trade. “What are you doing here?”

  Shrdnae Witches . . . do they know I’m the future king of Stonehold? If they do I’m dead . . . And then another realization.

  Sena is one of them . . .

  It kept going through his head, combined with all the occasions he had pressed Sena for information about the Shrdnae Witches based solely on the fact that she had grown up in the Country of Miryhr, when in fact she had been one.

  “I’m not going to ask again,” said the woman on the shed. She was beautiful. The sunlight trickling across her nose; her smile, a pleasant disguise for the threat she represented.

  Caliph knew he had to answer and that the more truth he injected into the conversation, the less likely he was to wind up dead.

  “I came to see Sena.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  Caliph had been briefed at school. As the future ruler of Stonehold, he had been given access to certain antiseptic details about who the Shrdnae Witches were and how they worked. Shrdnae field agents were forbidden from any kind of relationship that could compromise them: pregnancy in the all-female organization was strictly regulated. For Shrdnae operatives, sex was part of their training. It was an art form they perfected just like assassination and like their trademark knife sheaths, their legs didn’t open unless it was part of the job.

  She knew I was going to be king . . . was she using me the whole time? Caliph’s brain froze around a new thought. Her letter! Just to lure me out where they could kill me? Ransom? He couldn’t help himself. He pitched forward on his hands and knees, retching; everything he’d just eaten turned out in the grass.

  For a while he stared at the weeds, watching the slick amber liquid attract bugs. His torso convulsed again; he didn’t care what the women were doing.

  “Sena’s always taken her men watered down.”

  “Not her boyfriend,” Caliph managed to croak. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. He felt dizzy from the heat, like he might pass out.

  “You must know her well enough to walk through her house and take her horse.”

  “I wish I was her boyfriend. I went to school with her.” He picked one of the Naked Eight at random. “Name’s David.”

  “Get up, David . . .”

  CHAPTER 7

  Caliph stood up. As he did, the woman on the roof pitched forward like a gargoyle breaking loose from a building. She plummeted into the weeds at Caliph’s feet, landing with a simultaneous crunch-thud; she did not move again.

  He turned around. The woman behind him was standing perfectly still with a shaft of gleaming metal sticking out of her cheek. She fell forward into the flowers, brushing Caliph’s shoulder on her way down.

  Caliph ran.

  He vaulted the split-rail fence and landed in the pasture, heading for the horse. He saw its tentacle tails flipping gently like a fistful of snakes, its slab teeth shearing contentedly through grass. It looked up, watched him for a moment, then roared. Its claws ripped massive clods of sod from the ground as it bolted away, racing for the far end of the pasture.

  Caliph slipped and skidded in a patch of mud; the momentum flipped him onto his back like a turtle, speeding him over moss and horse shit down a gentle slope and finally depositing him near the edge of the pond.

  When Caliph opened his eyes, the sun had gone behind a cloud and everything looked gray. There were men with duralumin wings and chemiostatic cells on their backs, landing in the pasture. They cradled gas-powered bows and huge compression guns in their arms. Their goggles were chrome blue. Their flight suits black.

  Caliph heard heavy propellers and looked up. Not a cloud. A vast porcine airship blotted out the sun.

  There were men surrounding him. They wore rapiers and made signals with their hands, telling each other what to do. So fast. Caliph couldn’t tell where they had come from but he assumed they too had dropped from the zeppelin.

  “Caliph Howl?”

  A man was shouting from slightly uphill. He reached down and pulled Caliph from the mud. “Caliph Howl?”

  Dazed beyond speaking, Caliph could only nod.

  “I’m Master Sergeant Timms.” He shook Caliph’s hand, seemingly unfazed by the thick muck covering almost every inch of Caliph’s body. “Trying to give us the slip there again, literally . . .” He smiled. His teeth were slightly crooked but very white.

  Caliph looked around. It seemed obvious that Stonehold had found him. Snipers had killed the Shrdnae Witches and this man was now taking him north. Far north. Over the Country of Miryhr, east of Eloth, past Sena—wherever she was—beyond the Greencap Mountains and down into the Duchy of Stonehold.

  Caliph knew he didn’t have a choice in this. He didn’t have a choice that the women were dead, or that he didn’t want to be king. He knew that now, suddenly. He didn’t want to be king. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to find Sena either. Everything between them must have been a lie. Or was it?

  His mind was already toying with ways to suspend judgment. Maybe there had been a mistake.

  He was walking, letting Master Sergeant Timms steer him like a cow toward a harness that hung from a cable like a tail trailing into the sky.

  “Don’t worry, your majesty. You’re safe now. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  Caliph felt the buckles snap around his chest, his groin, his legs. He looked across the pasture to where more men were corralling the horse, maneuvering it toward a horse-sized sling. Why would they do that? It’s not even my horse . . .

  Master Sergeant Timms was grinning in Caliph’s face, white teeth and blue goggles reflecting Caliph’s sordid condition like a mirror. He je
rked the cable several times and Caliph felt himself float up into cool air, away from the squalid heat of the pasture, reeled in like a fish by the hand of providence.

  He moved from thoughts of Sena to thoughts of Stonehold. What will happen when I get there? Wretchedly submit to the tenure of public service? And then there was the other logical notion that being High King might not be so bad a thing.

  Caliph vomited again from a hundred feet above the ground, hoping he missed Sergeant Timms. Landing on the deck was a blur. The winch stopped. There was a smell of hot machine grease. Then Caliph was in a small metal shower stall cleaning off, getting dressed, crawling into a bunk that smelled of bleach. He shivered from the trauma, the violence . . . but was soon asleep.

  A change in engine pitch woke him. It was dark. He rubbed his eyes, trying to remember where he was. He pulled a robe from the back of the tiny room’s door, tied it on and stepped out into a gray corridor.

  There was a man stationed outside his room who said nothing. Caliph looked both ways and arbitrarily chose right. The passage led him outside onto a deck that stared into the night. Flashing lights reflected on the railing from the overhead zeppelin skin.

  Below, in the black abyss, green-lensed gas lamps erupted from turrets, hooded and massive like grotesque helmets. Their ornate leaded glass launched groaning beacons into the dark, lighting an aerial highway not just for this ship, but for pilots ferrying metholinate to the Independent Alliance of Wardale and the Free Mercantilism of Yorba.

  Beyond the beacons, twinkling in the distance, a massive sprawl of lights smoldered beneath a pancake of brown clouds. Naobi burned, staring out from just beneath the cloud cover, turning the Dunatis Sea into a hypnotist’s cauldron flecked with light.

  Master Sergeant Timms appeared at Caliph’s side, summoned suddenly by the look of it. His short ash-brown hair was slightly crimped and his eyes looked bleary. “Did you sleep, your majesty?”

  Caliph made the hand sign for yes. “I guess so.”

  “Not very luxurious,” Timms said, “but it’s the best we could do for you on this ship.” He looked out at the approaching landscape of lights. “They know we’re coming. Tomorrow’s going to be a busy day. Can I get you anything to eat?”

  Three hours later, Caliph Howl landed in Isca.

  Maps lay scattered across the old tactical table of the High King’s tower, rustling in a breeze from the window where Caliph stood staring out at the city.

  He tried to follow the arcaded gutters that sluiced rain and night soil and anything else that oozed or floated but tracking them was impossible. His eyes drifted through the blackened spires of Temple Hill, down into Ironside where the Iscan navy bristled and the Dunatis shone like a colony of golden beetles.

  Almost mythic, Caliph thought.

  The Duchy of Stonehold had not been a true duchy since Donovan Blek liberated it from the Kingdom of Greymoor six hundred sixty-eight years ago and shortly thereafter choked on his own tongue.

  As the years passed, a queer mongrelization of southern technology and northern hocus-pocus settled across the land.

  Much of the original tribal ferocity persisted in aristocratic form, as barristers with familiar chieftain surnames like Cumall and Hynsyil flung opinions like spears around the courtrooms of the north. Others became constables and burgomasters and sometimes even kings.

  Backward by most accounts, the Duchy of Stonehold was a pseudo-feudal monarchy buttressed by a complex aristocracy composed of wealthy merchants, factory owners, artisans and businessmen. It was a cobbled mess of governmental offices and overstated positions. It was five duchies, five kingdoms really. Four lesser kings unified by the High King in Isca, all of which echoed obsolete tribalism: tribalism that stoked the main fires of Stonehold’s nameless hybrid political engine.

  Miles away, the industrial yards of Growl Mort and East Murkbell spewed smoke as cohesive as black ink. From the weltering ooze, little golden lights winked and twinkled—all that remained of holomorphic energies poured into furnaces at Vog Foundry and the shipbuilding yards of Bilgeburg.

  Caliph turned his back on the phantasmagoric vista and focused once again on the gruff interplay of voices barking all around him.

  King Lewis had just said something outlandish and there were whispers from the crowd.

  Lewis laid claim to a well-thinned head of hair the color of used engine grease that he combed straight back and a body like a glutted wineskin that slumped in his chair, leaning forward into a dramatic pitch of evening light.

  “Mayor Ashlen knows more about war campaigns . . .”

  Ashlen Kneads, whose last name had become a pun, sat quietly in the corner ferrying occlusions from his nose to some hidden sticking point beneath his chair.

  Another voice, one that Caliph was only recently acquainted with, came from Yrisl Dale, the Blue General and Caliph’s chief military advisor. He too was whispering angrily.

  “He is the High King. Show him some respect!”

  “Respect? He’s staring off into space . . .” Without looking, Lewis tossed a hand in Caliph’s direction. “The least he could do is pretend we are here!”

  Snickers twittered in the assembly, subdued because everyone could see that Caliph was now paying attention.

  One of the power players, Prince Mortiman of Tentinil, sat laconically, one foot resting on the seat of a nearby chair, listening to Lewis vent. He wore a cold smile that matched his platinum jewelry.

  Lewis continued. “I’ve put off meeting with Pplarian ambassadors for two days because of this.”

  “Don’t treat it like it’s nonsense,” the prince chirped. His dark eyes flashed across the room and bored into Caliph’s face with a strange mixture of warmth and aggression. “Why do you think my mother is still in Tentinil? Saergaeth will turn the zeppelins coming from the Memnaw into war engines! He can turn off our supply of gas like that!” He snapped his fingers. “We’ve seen fires in Bellgrass. There are troops maneuvering and engines massing in the hills north of Newt Lake.” His lips moved like sculpted rubber, perfect and pale.

  Lewis snorted. “Saergaeth could be on maneuvers . . . or logging trees for all we know.”

  The whole room suddenly exploded. Everyone had an opinion and all of them started coming out at the same time. Cries about proving whether there was a valid threat from Saergaeth clashed with statements that questioned old alliances, loyalty, greed and cowardice.

  Through the jungle of bodies, Mortiman continued to stare. Caliph looked away.

  One of the burgomasters was saying, “I doubt it, but the Council wants to appear vigilant. Saergaeth is angry the High King’s throne is going to be filled by a boy just out of Desdae. I think he thought he still had a chance of seducing the Council until this week.”

  Another burgomaster seated nearby responded and his words echoed in Caliph’s ears. “Well it’s got to be clear to Saergaeth now that he’s not going to be High King. Saergaeth’s diplomacy is at an end.”

  Caliph realized now that most of the burgomasters were here, curious to know firsthand how a civil war might affect the economy of their respective boroughs.

  Mortiman spoke up. “Does his majesty have a voice?”

  The room stilled. Roughly two dozen heads turned expectantly toward Caliph.

  “He’s speechless,” said Lewis, starting to look away.

  “Maybe,” agreed the prince. “Maybe he’s worrying about his father in Fallow Down, ordered to garrison there with the rest of the fodder.”

  What the fuck are you on about? thought Caliph.

  Lewis chuckled. “Forgive him, everyone. He’s still mourning the loss of those witches—”

  Despite the Council’s strict mandate that the events in the Highlands remain undisclosed, too many people knew about Caliph’s rescue. And since the Council’s ability to enforce its own will had dissolved along with it, details had invariably leaked.

  Caliph knew his moment had come. If he waited a second longer his persona woul
d slip from silent, past mute to join Ashlen Kneads in the rank and file of the dumb. He had to take control of the room. He had to make them understand that he knew he was the king.

  But the men around him wore business suits and jewels while Caliph had come to the meeting in prosaic black. He wore a sweater for the chilly evening air, riding pants and dusty black boots.

  “All right,” said Caliph. Lewis stopped, midsentence. The soft, distinct syllables of Caliph’s voice seemed to have more impact than if he had shouted.

  The prince was smiling.

  “This isn’t a parliament,” said Caliph. “And I don’t know why all of you are talking.”

  “Maybe if you—”

  Caliph shot a look at the prince who stopped speaking but kept smiling, a sort of silent laughter.

  “Saergaeth Brindlestrm is a hero,” said Caliph. “He’s served this country for almost thirty years. I believe he still wants what . . . he thinks . . . is best for the Duchy . . . and I plan to establish some dialogue with him about that. In the meantime, we are not at war.”

  “We are at war,” said the prince, “or might as well be. Saergaeth isn’t going to stop until he’s sitting on your throne. I really thought you’d be clever enough to grasp that.”

  Caliph looked directly at the prince. “Would you like to apologize now or later?”

  The room collectively caught its breath.

  Mortiman simpered, “Your majesty . . . this really isn’t the place . . .” His smile was insincere and his tone glib. “Besides, without me . . . Saergaeth will lay siege to Isca by autumn.”

  The crowd waited, watching as Caliph found his words.

  “Assuming that were true, you’d be dead or conquered by then. It’s not really in your interest to advise me on what follows, is it?”

  The crowd gasped.

  Everyone knew what Caliph meant. The notion that Mortiman was more of a queen than a prince was old news. Likewise, the fact that Saergaeth held the prince in contempt on account of his preferences had been widely recognized for years. But that Caliph was brash enough to expose Mortiman’s posturing with artillery based on such sensitive trivia actually seemed to impress many of the more reptilian burgomasters.