The Last Page (51 page)

He’s waiting,
thought Roric.
Biding his time until his zeppelins are retrofitted for war.
By that time, Roric planned to be somewhere else.

North of the river, over the steep wooden rooftops of Fallow Down, a storm was bloating. A great horn of cloud curved out of the sky, white and gleaming on top, black and treacherous underneath. It spiked down into the ground like a massive rooting claw.

It had developed with savage speed, tumefying out of nowhere.

Roric felt the urge for a better view. As his father’s son, he laid claim to more clout than approval but when he asked the commander of the engine to gun the machine for higher ground his request was accommodated with surprising pliancy.

The light war engine hunched forward as it tore up Dürm
th Hill, providing a decent view across the river toward the south of town.

Trees shattered into pulpy pink blossoms, ripped into hirsute shreds by the huge stuttering tracks. Birds and panicked soot-tails bolted from their hiding places as the machine powered east toward the summit. It hunkered forward on strange scorpion joints against the grade.

A lone gruelock that had been lurking in a tree swung into a deep ravine before Roric could shoulder his crossbow. Its black furry body swept gracefully through the branches, several arms moving at speed, unaccustomed but shifting nevertheless quickly from the role of predator to prey.

When they hit the summit, the engine relaxed to a chugging idle, flexing its body back into its usual shape.

Garen and the commander stepped out onto the top deck with Roric, removing their gas masks in order to talk.

“Good view,” said the commander. He had to grimace to keep his teeth from chattering with the machine’s pandemic vibration.

Fallow Down had turned into a tactical maze. All the noncombatants had crossed the bridge south into the High King’s lands or tramped north to side with Saergaeth.

It was the age-old ugliness of civil war: father against son, friend versus friend. The town’s layout spread old stone and rusty fingers in starfish multiplicity from a central square. It looked squalid and gray, oppressed by the blossoming cloud.

Roric snapped open his spyglass. Despite the jittering of the deck, he could see troops in the streets and snipers with crossbows patrolling rooftops. To the west, beyond the range of engagement, Miskatoll’s light war engines continued to scud along the bank, occasionally sending a glittering emerald arcing over the river to lift in a puff of poison on the south side.

The Somber Hills tumbled morosely to the north, already black and sodden under the shadow of the storm.

“He’s toying with us,” said the commander. “He won’t cross here. Clever bastard’s worked through the mountains. Bendain’s Keep is under siege.”

Fear leaked like treacle down Roric’s spine. Kennan Keep was next in line.

“He probably wants the whole string of keeps as zeppelin stations,” said Garen.

As the men speculated, Roric’s understanding unfolded. If Saergaeth controlled the keeps in the Greencaps, he would control the lowlands as well. His enormous fleet of zeppelins could then pummel the open plains at their leisure and retreat into the crags like dragons to roost.

“If Caliph Howl ain’t building airships like Mathias Starlet, he’s going to be serving steel wine in Isca.”

“That’s true enough,” muttered Garen.

Roric marveled. The fact that Saergaeth was outwitting Caliph pumped a quiet, petulant, albeit vicarious sense of victory through his veins.

“What the fuck is going on with those clouds anyway?” asked Garen.

All three men gazed at the horn-shaped storm whose hook had bled in swizzled patterns toward the river. At first it looked like the sky had gone rampage-wild. Weltering in frenzied tumbling gouts like a pot of boiling milk hung upside down.

The chaos defied gravity.

Foaming snub-nosed lumps of vapor pushed toward the ground and then retreated, sloshing back into a sky that shuddered like pudding.

Variegated layers of atmosphere burst like invisible pillows, scattering sudden snow. The three men would have cursed if they hadn’t been so surprised.

Despite the sudden cold that rolled across the plains at subsonic speed, the air wavered and danced as if through a mirage of heat. Something vast rippled across the sky like momentary circus glass, bending the clouds, warping the structures of Fallow Down like brown kelp.

Across the river, Saergaeth’s engines seemed to shiver in the cold, wobbling and trembling like metal bees on honeycomb.

Roric stood at the edge of miles of warped space. It was as if the very air were melting.

The snowfall rolled and veered erratically as though hesitant to fall. Hovering like ash. A shadow six miles in every direction passed over the ground, sliding from the Somber Hills toward Fallow Down. It cast the town in purple umber and dyed the river muscles black.

The entire sky thrashed madly for an instant, flailing as though seen through the bodies of a million glass eels.

The entire crew of the engine, from gunners to coal-throwers to the navigator on the bridge, had crept out onto the decks or pivoted their turrets to watch the display.

It felt to all of them as if there should have been some nightmare sound accompanying the untoward air. But there was nothing. Just the cold and the quiet. The atmosphere burst with slippery invisible grotesque modulation. It flexed. Rolled. Then suddenly it stopped.

The shadow evaporated as if the cloud casting it had dried up. The darkness dwindled. The strange convolutions of atmosphere smoothed without a trace.

“Fuck thunder!” whispered the commander.

Saergaeth’s engines had disappeared. Fallow Down, the entire mile-and-a-half-wide sprawl of town—everything north of the river, was gone!

Roric remembered his father and screamed.

After fifteen minutes of heated debate and speculation over whether the phenomenon had indeed reached terminus, Garen and the commander agreed over Roric’s insistent wail that they might as well throw dice. Nothing either one of them could say made any sense in the face of such an aberration. So they decided to take pity on Roric Feldman and risk an investigation.

The light engine smashed down the north face of Dürm
th Hill at top speed, crashing through bracken, spitting out flinders and destruction in its wake. When it hit level ground the gears shifted and the treads gouged fresh earth, flinging clods as the machine barreled toward the bridge.

Roric wiped tears from his eyes as he clutched a gas-powered crossbow to his chest. He was shaking with horror, disbelief and utter confusion. Garen stood behind him on the deck, holding a bow of his own. The howling pound of the engines made any kind of conversation impossible.

As they reached the bridge, the treads clattered dolorously and maniacally over the stone, creating such a racket that Roric hung his bow on a steel strut and plugged his ears. It took little less than a minute to cross the half-mile bridge.

What greeted them on the other side would go down as one of the strangest discoveries of the fifth century. And the strangest part was that there was nothing there. Nothing to catalogue. Nothing coherent to sift through.

Roric clambered down the two sets of rungs and leapt to the ground. He scoured the area with his eyes, looking for remains.

Remains?

What remains?
he thought brokenly. There was nothing! The ground in every direction had been pulverized to fine gray powder. Granules actually. Tiny hollow nuggets like blistered pewter. Miniscule ball bearings. Some were fused in clumps. Some were slightly larger, the size of a sparrow’s eye. Roric lifted a handful and let them trickle through his fingers, ugly leaden beads, freezing to the touch. His fingers ached immediately.

There were still traces of snow, melting rapidly as the summer wind swept in, displacing the anomalous front.

Roric searched for anything. A filament of blackened straw, a splinter of wood or the blasted fragments of bricks poking out of the sweepings. But there was nothing. Not a grain of wheat. Not a beetle wing.

As he disturbed the tiny spheres with his hand Roric had noticed the awful withering stench seeping from the ground. It nearly gagged him and he stumbled backward, dropping the bubbled pellets in disgust. He perceived a trace of diversity in the destruction. Here and there the scrap of widespread disintegration had hardened into a grisly yellowish-gray-green and purple crust. It looked like molten slag had cooled into thin metallic plates, pocked and cratered and ugly.

Roric wept and cursed and kicked about, sending up large clouds of noxious invisible fume. The swath of obliteration centered on the former town and swept its ruin west along the rivage. It had encompassed Saergaeth’s war engines and left nothing behind. Even the zeppelin was gone, dissolved instantly in air.

Roric kicked in the dust, heedless of the choking stench. His rage did not diminish when the vapors overcame him, and he began to gag and heave. He crouched, gasping, spewing vomit from his nose and mouth.

Garen and the commander had donned their gas masks. They seized Roric and dragged him, despite his spastic kicking, from the field of dull glittering beads.

Back near the relative safety of the idling machine where the air was less toxic and infused only with engine smoke, they laid Roric out on the deck. His eyes were weeping clear mucosa and slimy bile dribbled from his chin and nose—but he was breathing.

“You dumb fuck!” whispered the commander. He turned his attention to Garen. “Next time he tries a stunt like that, I leave both of you behind.”

Garen nodded and snapped his fingers in front of Roric’s clouded eyes. The commander went inside and ordered the engine to back up and head for the bridge.

When Garen looked at Roric, his face took on a barely discernable expression of compassion.

Back on the other side of the bridge, the commander joined the other two engine crews at the HQ pavilion and met the lieutenant colonel of the battalion overseeing the bridge, the five-man demolition team that had wired it and the two knights serving mostly as military advisors.

By the time Roric was breathing well enough to sit up and look around, a fierce argument was already underway.

“We do not, repeat, do not blow the bridge without imminent threat,” the lieutenant colonel was saying. His face flushed and strained and his eyes flashed from one man to another as he tried to bring the others under control. All of them were formidable professionals.

“That’s not imminent enough for you?” One of the knights threw his arm in the direction of the disturbance. That’s what they were calling it.
A disturbance.

“Imminent threat of enemy crossing,” finished the lieutenant colonel. “We have orders. And that wasn’t the enemy. We don’t know what that was!”

He was shouting in the knight’s face, a brave and rash thing to do. Spittle was flying. He flung his hand toward the sky. “You think blowing the bridge will stop that if it comes back?”

The knight did not back down. “Do I look like I give a fuck? We have mass casualties. You’ve got less than a thousand men left. Our zeppelin’s gone. Most of our supplies were in that town. This just became an indefensible, tactically dead position. What good is the bridge without Fallow Down?”

“You’re not authorized to make that decision!”

“Whore-shit!” fired the knight. “Decisions like this are why I’m fucking here. We aren’t FNG. Our orders were to protect Fallow Down which—by the fucking way—is gone!”