The Last Page (26 page)

It was just as well that Caliph hadn’t followed her here. He would have found the ruins empty.

She bent over one of the elegant lids that decorated the floor and pushed. It ground away to reveal a dark trough. The bones inside had dried and long since lost their odor.

She found her pack just where she had left it, crouched in a corner by the yellow feet. She pulled it out, loosening the buckles.

The crimson book slid smoothly into her palms, leather soft and cool against her fingertips.

“Megan’s looking for you,” she whispered to it.

Almost reassuringly, the faint howl that only she could hear floated up onto the moldy draft. Outside, the sky flickered. Thunder rolled like a boulder over the Javneh Mountains and sweet-smelling water began to trickle from cracks a hundred feet overhead.

Sena didn’t give a damn about Megan and her errands. All she wanted was to open the book. And Caliph remained her best chance of that.
Now Megan actually
wants
me stargazing over his shoulder! And I was worried about får
n
¹⁰
at Desdae!

Sena thought about seeing the pages of the
C
srym T
, covered with Inti’Drou glyphs. Secrets larger than the world, like an infinite opalescent mobile hung above her crib, cutting across and out: away from the planet. Past the sun. Past the blackness.

Sena let herself wallow in anticipation for a moment. Then she stood up and left Esma, walking lines back to the Highlands of Tue.

⁸
I.: The Place of Burning.

⁹
O.S.: Water of Apparitions.

¹⁰
W.: The Betrayal.

Caliph’s week with Mr. Vhortghast had been just what he expected, exhausting, numbing and filled with rancorous, often disconcerting details. He despised being king.

He had seen warehouses filled with qaam-dihet seized from drug lords in Thief Town and Maruchine. Stockpiles of munitions. Gas mines and vitriol bombs laid in the bellies of zeppelins. He had returned to Malgôr Hangar for a full tour; seen the armada of brigs and first rates and the only three dreadnoughts in the Duchy of Stonehold, powered by iron sails and mountains of coal and acid.

He had talked with every burgomaster willing to meet, found how each borough squared (as nearly as he could) from the sources at his disposal. He had traveled to every district with the notable exception of Ghoul Court, which (the more he thought about it) seemed less like a borough and more like an independent state.

Caliph had examined tax reports and census reports and toxicity levels from the city well water. He had been shown Bloodsump Lane in all its anathematic squalor under broad daylight without the merciful cover of dark. He had made an appearance at Hullmallow Cathedral for its customary rededication (which happened at the beginning of every High King’s reign) to the multitude of gods worshiped in the seething city and shortly thereafter visited Cripple Gate where he had donated a large sum to the Church of the Mourning Beggar that brooked homeless people from Three Cats and Candleshine.

It had been ten days of nonstop secular, religious and image-enhancing activity. And there was only one thing Caliph knew for sure.

The city stank.

Gadriel assured him that it would not last long. Only at the height of summer did the streets cider. That’s what Gadriel called it.

“The streets cider,” he said, “when the weather turns warm.”

Caliph couldn’t have picked a milder assessment if he had spent all day thinking. Gadriel’s euphemism was actually a total mollification of reality.

What really happened was that piles of garbage stacked between slum buildings generated spontaneous life as hot weather and their own weight started to liquefy discarded foods and mattresses and cans of varnish and bags of powdered paint.

Great heaps wedged in alleys began to ooze and seep. First- and second-story tenants could do nothing but draw their moth-eaten drapes and ignore the squirming refuse that threatened to break through their windowpanes.

The piles could only grow if people on the top floors tossed garbage out their casements or off the roof—which they frequently did. Great armies of flies stirred in the labyrinth of trash, a dual testament to people’s inordinate laziness and the fact that the wasteyard in Brindle Fenn was not large enough, even at nearly a hundred acres in size.

To say that the streets cidered was nearly as litotic as saying that sticking one’s head into the anus of a cow was not a very tempting thing to do. But what troubled Caliph most was that Gadriel’s description seemed less outlandish when it was said within the confines of the castle.

Not all of Isca City was ripe with festering piles of detritus and tatters and offal and sludge. There were enchanting canals in Murkbell, bewitching beauty in the endless arches of Candleshine and Lampfire Hills. Bl
kton fairly suffocated under the ambrosial pollen of variegated blossoms. There were hundreds of clean streets swept up by men with long-handled dustpans every night, places where (rain or shine) the bricks gleamed with polish. For the rich and fortunate and even for a great quantity of middle-classed citizens, saying that Isca cidered in the summer did not seem a cruel understatement of the truth.

But Caliph had seen the cesspools. They weighed on him as if their great piles of garbage had been stacked in his own bedroom.

While he pondered the slums, Caliph examined the sword given him on the zeppelin deck of West Gate.

It was a marvelous piece. Forged out of tunsia, the blade would actually float on water. It was impervious to the rust and corrosion of weather, which Mr. Vhortghast had joked was good fortune considering what Caliph’s previous blade had endured.

Light and quick and sharpened by holomorphic stones to an edge only tunsia could hold, the sword was broad and short and two-handed with a long handle filled by apple-green chemiostatic fluid. It represented the highest achievement in hand-to-hand combat possible north of the Great Cloud Rift.

The cell was good for two or three wallops before it had to be changed out. A beryllium circuit traveling down the center of the blade ended at a
silvery point where even a glancing thrust enabled the charged sword to deliver the coulombs capable of deep tissue burns and the vaporization of flesh. A dark whimsical thing, Caliph’s chemiostatic sword could produce surreal open or comminuted bone fractures. Paralysis. Thrombosis. Death.

He had never flicked the switch on the pommel that charged the circuit from the cell. There was a safety ring that had to be unscrewed, loosening tension before the switch could move.

Determined not to grow soft and lethargic, Caliph practiced forty minutes a day. The tunsia edge removed the oak necks of practice dummies like a machete slicing through bamboo.

On the last day of P
sh, as the city cidered and Caliph pondered the problem of the slums, he received word while taking tea in the high tower that he had visitors. Two young men by the names of David Thacker and Sigmund Dulgensen.

Caliph set his cup down so hard he chipped the saucer. He leapt up and sped down the many staircases to the grand hall. His elation and joy over hearing the familiar names was indisguisable.

As he approached the grand hall he slowed, forced himself to walk instead of run. When he reached the archway he paused. He peered into the vast room where a curtain of light fell from the windows, glittering with millions of dust motes.

There they were, two of the Naked Eight standing in conversant poses near the darkened fireplace. Two of the boys who had shared his misery in the pillory and his triumph when Roric Feldman had gone home in shame.

Caliph flew into the room and fairly danced around them, overjoyed by their visit. He bid them sit before the unlit hearth while they recounted certain professors and Chancellor Eaton and his cane.

Sigmund Dulgensen was a brilliant engineer. He had studied almost nothing else at school and he could tell any listener all the differences between stress and wear and flow meters and load cells and solenoids and calibration.

His hands never came clean.

The tiny grooves around his nails and the whorls of his fingerprints were impregnated with burnt oil, engine grease and other grime. He was a meaty man. Strong. And often sat with a strange humorless smile on his face caused by the emotionless contortion required to chew at the hair under his lower lip.

David Thacker was Sigmund’s antithesis even though they shared the same build. He was nearly as large but hopelessly docile. He had taken
calligraphy and painting and all kinds of other classes that his friends called useless crap. Caliph wasn’t sure what degree David had actually graduated with.