The Last Page (45 page)

She leaned against the stone and stared down at the strange city. Morning fog sagged in the lowlands and distant shouts ricocheted through the gray patched-over brick of West Fen. She was an interloper, a foreigner. And yet the book’s howl seemed to quiet in this land, to give her respite from the urgency to open it.

“Yella by
n,” she whispered with derision.
This is not my home. Once this is over I will not be able to stay here.
She knocked the back of her head against the stone as if to dislodge the fantasy.

For a long time she thought of nothing. She cleared her mind and stood enjoying the clean damp smell of the upland. A mile away the city groaned in discordant unison, like some massive abomination in the agonies of birth.

At the edge of West Fen, breaking from the jagged edge of farm machinery piled against three-story buildings, an enormous black horse trotted into view.

For Caliph, traveling alone outside the castle was not only pointedly stupid, but also difficult to achieve. Yet he had managed to slip away.

He called a greeting in Old Speech.

“You hardly look Hjolk-trull.” She crossed her arms and stood with her head tilted toward one shoulder.

He reached down, extended his hand to her.

She took it and pulled herself up onto the pillion.

“That’s all right. What’s a Hjolk-trull?” he joked. “Did you know I stole your horse?”

“Did you know I’m a witch?” It had to come out sooner or later. She couldn’t live at the castle and hide her books, her study, her passion. He had been to the cottage, to her hidden cellar.
He
had
to know!

“Crossed my mind,” he said.

She settled behind him and spoke directly into his ear. “That’s quite a headline:
HIGH KING IS WITCH-FUCKING HORSE THIEF
. Where are we going?”

He shrugged. “Somewhere. I think it’s time I looked around in some old places.” The warhorse lurched up the tor’s heathery slope.

“I suppose I’m one of them?” Sena said. “Your old places?”

“Old friends,” he corrected. “First we try to hide our relationship, now the verbal sparring. Are we going to do acrostics next?”

“Mmm—” Her lips were warm against his neck.

Caliph’s horse worked into a canter, claws gouging the ground beneath them. The rhythm reminded Sena of the night before.

They rode up a tor and down through some boggy runoff below the mountains. Then up again into steeper foothills. Both of them had to duck their heads as Caliph guided the animal under venerable trees and onto an overgrown road.

“Are we going home?” Sena asked.

Caliph nodded.

Up ahead, a mansion loomed out of the elms and maples. Its towers disappeared as the horse took them through a tunnel of rustling branches. The towers reappeared when the tunnel opened before an imposing house built more like a fortress. It smelled like the woods. Pollen. Spores. Warm damp greenery and rot.

The great sweep of lawn tossed waist-deep grass, weeds mostly. Everything gone to seed. Ivy had taken over the structure. The chimneys looked like strange leafy sentinels standing in a row.

“Has a little character, does it?” Sena said. The blank windowpanes screamed at her. Several had avoided the vine’s complete strangulation. She watched a white squirrel run along a sill gripping a nut in its mouth.

“Just like I left it,” Caliph joked. He urged the warhorse into the clearing that had once been his front lawn.

Sena looked back over one shoulder then the other, trying to see a series of large statues set around the edge of the estate. They were enslaved by vines, nearly unrecognizable amid the trees. One seemed to be a seraphic form holding a broken sword, weeping green lines down cracks in her face.

“Where do they lead?” She pointed to the right at a few white traces of stone that led deeper into the woods.

Caliph felt an unsettling wash of memory.

“Family graveyard.” He dismounted and, as he tethered the horse to some unruly bushes by the front steps, his boot hit something fragile, a cracked earthen bowl stained with the stuff of his nightmares.

He stepped over it, went up the steps. The fortresslike doors, bound in black iron, sprayed intricate metalwork before his eyes. The hinges depicted dead-eyed deer, wolves and wild pigs. They looked ready to take the hand of anyone brazen enough to reach for the knocker.

Sena stood in the weeds, looking up at the windows with rapt fascination. Spectral towers and hooded gables reached up, conjured pictures of Caliph as a brown-haired boy staring out from the panes. There were departures from normal geometry in the spires and turrets. Sena recognized anomalous angles, unsettling yet subtle differences in the thrust of the eves.

Obviously, when the great necromancer had moved in, he had altered the architecture slightly to accommodate his profession, changing space to enhance the dimensions on which his many windows looked. It was a marvelous achievement, one that Sena had tried to accomplish in her own cottage.

“Come on,” Caliph called from the top of the steps.

The spires seemed to bleed into the sky.

The doors’ lock had been long broken and Caliph pushed them open, revealing an empty foyer with a grand staircase and rotting paneled walls. Leaves and animal droppings littered the floor. Something that had been chewing on the timbers above the ceiling stopped its noise.

Sena sniffed the wet air. “It’s like the trees have come inside,” she
said, “guests to a long-expired party.” A sapling grew through the floor of the pantry. It reached for a sunlit hole in the ceiling. She watched Caliph’s eyes roam the shapes of the empty alcoves and broken banister.

“The estate was auctioned off to nobles to put me through school after my uncle died. I’m not sure what happened to it since then.”

He took one step up the stairs and stopped. “Funny. I don’t feel like being here anymore.”

Sena glanced through wide doorways to the right and left. To the right, mildewed plaster sagged precariously from the kitchen ceiling. Much of it had fallen to the floor by the hearth, crumbling to its raw ingredients of lime and sand.

To the left, spider-infested dining halls, parlors and rooms without discernable use burrowed away under great beams and blocks of stone.

“Why did you come back then?”

Caliph printed his name in the dust.

“It seemed like I dreamt it. I wanted to come back, you know? See if it was real. I guess I wanted to show it to you. Nothing from my childhood seems real anymore.” He chuckled. “I had this imaginary friend. Marco.” His voice grew thick and slow.

“He talked to me at night, told me stories of kings and war and death. Always death.” Caliph nodded outside. “He lived in the graveyard.”

Sena’s face showed a curious mix of sympathy and morbid fascination.

“Then I found out he was real.”

“Real?”

“My uncle was an extraordinary holomorph.” Caliph rubbed dust from his fingertips.

His childhood had consisted of this house, his uncle and the few servants on staff. When he looked around, fragmentary images of Cameron, the dream-man, strode through the cankered passageways and grim parlors.

As usual, the memories were muddy. He knew that the family had chased his rogue of a father off, and that his mother had remained here with her parents.

Then came the unfortunate dinner, an event he had no recollection of. And after that, or so he had been told, his uncle had come out of the south, claiming both the estate and Caliph: a diaper-wearing toddler.

He knew the house must have changed with his uncle’s arrival. There must have been a time when the banisters were polished to a golden sheen and bright-colored rugs and vases gleamed in the light of the tall mullioned windows flung open to the sun. But Caliph could not remember such a time or any time when this huge hollow house had been decorated
in anything other than black tapestries with strange designs and dark woods imported at tremendous cost from jungles in the south.

One autumn, Cameron had walked out of the woods and come to live with them. It felt bizarre now. Where had Cameron come from? Why had Caliph’s uncle taken him in? Caliph remembered the kites and the toys that Cameron had carved on this wide stretch of lawn. With Cameron in the house, the nights seemed less dark and the shadows that moved without caster shrank slightly.

But then Caliph’s memory fumbled. Cameron had left. There had been a long journey in the middle of winter and Nathaniel had locked the house on the hill as if never to return. After that had come the white marble floors and the blood and Cameron’s voice as the two of them descended that long rope into darkness.

After the darkness, he had no memory whatsoever until, like walking through a doorway into a brightly lit room, he realized that Nathaniel was dead. Cameron had searched for and found Caliph’s father. With Jacob and Caliph’s reunion, Cameron had disolved into the north and never returned.

Jacob took Caliph to Candleshine, a crowded modest borough that pressed Isca’s southwest wall.

He had done the best he could but he was never prepared to be a father. He did not have the tools or the experience. He put Caliph in a local school run by the Sisters of the Second Moon and brought him home on weekends to continue where Cameron had left off—teaching him how to wield a sword.

“We should go. I feel like an idiot out here. I’m supposed to be a king managing a war.”

“Wait.” Sena sat down by him on the stairs and struggled free from her pack. “I have something to show you.”

Her supple fingers loosened the buckle and pushed past a change of clothes, her diary and a few other odds and ends. Deep at the bottom she gripped the cold soft skin of the
C
srym T
and hauled it up into the light.

Caliph stared at it in shock. His hand touched the filthy crimson leather then drew back as though bitten.

“Where did you get that?”

Sena set it on her knees. “It turned up in an old bookshop.”

“This is the book?” Caliph whispered in disbelief. “The one you talked about?”

“The one I told you about in the attic before I left Desdae.” She nodded.

Caliph stood up, stunned.

“This was my uncle’s book!”

“I know.”

It was a long time before Caliph spoke. “So . . . you were after me for that?”

“What?” She scowled.