The Last Page (65 page)

With the coming cleansing of the Court it was Zane’s last chance to tidy up. Caliph’s raid would be no less than devastating and there was little use in being diplomatic anymore.

Caliph talked with Cameron and Sena in the evening, exhuming additional childhood stories around the darkened fireplace in the grand hall. The city remained candent long into the evening while buzzing metal fans sucked humid shadows into the castle, across the faces and legs of the chatting friends.

After dusk they decided to go for a walk on the upper parapets. Caliph relished these spare hours because the days were so busy.

Caliph leaned heavily on the battlements, exhausted. He talked about his visit with David Thacker while Isca’s mythic nightscape did little to comfort him. Chimeric gears and water towers enmeshed steepled roofs and smoke. With Sena and Cameron, he watched the city’s slow dark rhythm of streetcars and zeppelins evoke to the sounds of bells floating out of dreamholes on Incense Street.

It hadn’t happened on the day he wanted it to. Things had come up. But by the ninth Caliph had finally made it down to the dungeons.

There had been a hearing, a jury, a verdict and so on. It had happened quickly in a system without the possibility of appeal. No one was surprised when one of the papers offered a litho-slide that showed the traitor’s face and the brassy headline:
FRAT BOY GETS DEATH
.

The
Iscan Herald
was superficially more tactful, its caption debatably less sensational:
MORE BAD NEWS FOR KING HOWL
. Both papers were careful to downplay the relationship between the High King and his former friend. They gave Caliph the benefit of the doubt.

Strangely, the same image of David Thacker had made its way into the hands of every major columnist and hatchet man the city over.

Caliph recounted his journey to the dungeons as he walked around the patio. The humiliation, the close, fetid air shuddering with moans and broken sobs. Unidentifiable scratching sounds and insane gibbering in the dark.

“It was awful. Some of those people have been down there since before I graduated Desdae.”

He recalled how those sane enough had pled for mercy, how others swore and spit and how several bone-thin crazies on seeing him had palmed their genitals and danced.

He had breathed through his cloak in an effort to stifle the smell. Despite the horror, it was only a short walk to David’s cage.

When he arrived he looked around, confused, wanting desperately to be mistaken, to find the unscathed face of David Thacker somewhere else.

Caliph set the lantern down and fairly crumpled to his knees before the effigy of his former friend. All his anger abandoned him. He began to sob, a dry-throated hysterical silence that dredged out his soul.

David had lost a great deal of weight in ten days. His hair was clumped and tangled up in dirty tufts. His face and neck were swollen and rife with untrimmed growth, a merciful actuality that helped disguise his beaten purple skin.

A huge black mouse hung like a sack under his right eye and his left hand was bandaged in a way that indicated missing parts.

David’s voice crackled like paper.

“Caph . . . Caph . . . is that really you? Is it that bad?” David touched his own face in a gentle vain way. “You’re the king, right? You can get me out of here. I’m sorry. I didn’t know what I was doing. I got . . . I got tangled up in . . . the wrong sorts of people, I mean. I just . . .”

He was breaking, beginning to mewl.

“I just want another chance. Just one more chance, Caph. Caph?”

Caliph held his head in one hand. He knelt before the cage, face heavy, eyes clenched tight. He had internalized his sorrow.

David gave up trying to speak. Maybe he could see that quite possibly something was about to happen in his favor. He bided his time patiently.

Caliph was brokenhearted at the sight of his friend. It was true. At a word, the coop would open, his friend emerge, ready to be nurtured back to health. The bruises would fade, the swelling subside. All could be forgiven. All mended. A second chance seemed an easy thing to grant.

“Caph?”

“What did you do?” Caliph whispered without looking up.

“Caph.” David’s voice was pleading. “I . . . I don’t know. I messed up. I already told them everything. The jury said I’m . . .” An additional question, unarticulated but understood, issued through the bars.
Aren’t you here to save me?

Caliph couldn’t look at him.

“Gods Dave, look what you’ve done! Did you have it all planned? That first day? The day I met you and Sig in the castle?”

“Mizraim, Emolus, fuck no! I didn’t know. I didn’t have a clue. It’s like I told them, Caph. I’m a sleeper. I’m a crawler, a nobody. This tattoo doesn’t mean shit . . . most of the time.”

Caliph looked up and saw David pat his stomach. His eyes were red where they weren’t black. They gushed an unremitting effusion of sticky tears.

“Show it to me.”

David lifted his shirt. An ugly little curlicue of ink flared above his navel, utterly nigrescent in the poor lamplight. Caliph had not been told about this.

“What does it mean?”

“Mean? Caph. What it means is that I’m branded. I was branded when I was twelve. How could I possibly have made a choice like that when I was twelve? How could I have known then that it would come to this? I’m a sleeper. Expendable as toilet paper. One use and pull the chain! I don’t even know enough information to keep from being tortured.”

“Who did it to you?”

David’s voice filled with hope. “I don’t know his name. Some guy, tall, pale face, really messed-up teeth. Crazy as a shithouse rat. I think he broke my ribs, Caph.”

“I mean the tattoo. Who gave it to you?”

David slumped against the bars, crestfallen.

“Cabal of Wights. Only I’m not them anymore. They cut me loose like a sturgeon on a three-pound line.”

“Who are they? Some cult? Why in Emolus’ name would you join—?”

“Yeah, some cult! Some bad-ass, sacrifice you to the oyster-god cult! I don’t even know where they’re at. I’m the fringe on the lunatic fringe! We’re dry-bottom boys. They don’t tell us shit. I went for eight years not hearing a word, Caph. I swear. Then I meet a man in the street. I could tell right away he was one of the mucks. He was following me around King’s Road by the bistros. Tall, thin. Showed me his tattoo and said I was activated. But all he said to do was make sure the sewer grates in the east garden of Isca Castle were unlocked by noon on the twenty-fourth of Lüme. I swear. I swear I didn’t think that people were going to get hurt.”

“Then you didn’t think,” snapped Caliph. “And you’re a bigger fool than I thought. I took you in! I gave you money, a job, a place to live!”

“I was twelve—”

“Fuck twelve! How old were you when you unlocked the grates?”

“They would have killed me!”

Caliph was shouting. “And I couldn’t have protected you? Inside the castle? You provided them their only way in!

“Forty-two dead! You! You killed them! And now I’m supposed to what? Bail you out? Throw clemency in the face of my judges, the jury, the families of the forty-two soldiers we buried middle of this week?”

David rested his forehead on the bars. He chuckled softly.

“Do you remember our freshman year? When we bunked with Roric Feldman?”

Caliph nodded.

“Roric used to say the damnedest things,” whispered David. “He used to say to us,
‘Boys, if you fuck a sheep, what’s done is done, you have to shear your kids.’
I guess I fucked a sheep, Caph.”

Caliph’s heart went limp and cold. He stood to go.

“Caph, wait. I know . . . I know you.” He bit back on more tears. “I know you can’t . . . save me. But don’t leave me here. I’ll do anything not to spend my last hours down here.”

Caliph sighed. When he looked at David, trembling, emaciated, holding his butchered hand, he wanted to shout at the guards, call them over with the key, tell them bathetically to let his friend go free. He believed David’s words were true, that he hadn’t thought about the consequences of unlocking the grates.

Still, the fact remained that after it was done, after it was over, David Thacker had not come bawling like a baby and thrown himself on Caliph’s mercy. No. He had relocked the gates to cover his ass. He had hidden the truth. He had lied.

“You’ve told Mr. Vhortghast all you know?”

“Yes.” David’s eyes shone pleadingly.

“Then I guess we’re done here.”

“Don’t leave me. Please . . .”

“Guards!” Caliph shouted.

“Please, Caph.”

The soldiers from Gate One came trotting.

David’s other hand reached out through the bars, catching Caliph’s fingers. The touch was warm and soft. A writer’s hand. Unused to heavy labor. “Please, Caph.”

Caliph didn’t look back.

The guards led him away.

As he recounted his experience Sena shivered. Cameron looked away across the black twist of city far below.

What have I become?
Caliph thought. He knew that it was a question like David’s unspoken question that neither Sena nor Cameron could answer.

Four days later Caliph went to visit Sigmund Dulgensen.

Sigmund was appalled by David Thacker’s end, but not in the same way as Caliph. Sigmund didn’t have either the time or inclination to leave Ironside and talk about his loss. He and David Thacker had been proximal friends. Put any physical distance between the two of them and it was like they forgot one another existed.

A pot of coffee steadily lubricated the snarled calculations of solvitriol power. Sigmund was making headway. He assured Caliph that the lab’s security remained airtight. No one knew about the experiments. He looked giddy to plunge into a full account of his progress.

“I’m set up with a prototype, Caph.” Sigmund’s eyes were red but exuberant. “Take a peek at this.”

He pulled out a slender glass bulb haloed in iron, fitted with sockets or prongs at either end. He set it before the High King.

Caliph gazed at it for several moments, unable to speak. Like a chemiostatic cell the object glowed, but not green or citric yellow. It was not harsh or garish or easy to describe. Unusual pastel colors phosphoresced, crawling behind the glass. They rolled and ebbed along the iron bands, across the polished tabletop. They writhed, mucus pink or yellow ruffling into delicate shadows of lavender and powder blue. It was startling, mesmerizing to watch.

Caliph picked it up. It was cool, like a chilled wine bottle and tingled in his fingers like the back of a wooly caterpillar. He almost dropped it in surprise.

“What can it do?”

Sigmund was already chewing on his beard.

“Power a sword indefinitely. Power a fan, an ice maker, a conveyor belt—” He scratched the side of his face. “Whatever you want. Current generated is DC which means we can’t put it through a transformer like they have in the south or carry it very far, but you could hook it up to machines, wire it into a small string of streetlamps and guess what? They’ll never burn out.

“Enough kitties have gone whee to power a couple city blocks so far. I’ve got ’em stacked in racks down in the lab along with the adapters necessary to plug ’em in for electric lights and shit like that.”

Caliph nodded, still marveling at the tube of shifting light.

“Now here’s something that’ll really bake yer noggin. Come with me.”

He led Caliph down a metal staircase into the gritty squalor of the lab.
Huge machines stood rampant, bolted to the floor. Bizarre geometry unfolded like industrial plant life. It moved on heavy hinges by hydraulics or pressurized gas.

Caliph noticed the rack of additional solvitriol cells Sigmund had mentioned. They scintillated against the wall, a pale rainbow of ethereal colors.

“You must have found a lot of stray cats.”

Sigmund shrugged and led him toward two giant anvils of grease-blackened steel. They stood opposite each other, fenced off by chains, and separated by an empty groove of space.

Like great metal shoes, the anvil-shaped things had been anchored to the floor with massive bolts as well as huge reinforced posts driven many feet into the foundations of the building.

“It’s mostly solid forged like the bulkheads for the
Hylden
but each of these were specifically designed to take the strain.”

Caliph heard an ominous creak deep in the floor.

“This was our prototype containment housing since the blueprints didn’t go into what we should do if we managed to separate. Now we’ve got something better.”

As usual, Caliph was lost in Sigmund’s racing dialogue, trying frantically to make sense of parts Sigmund left unsaid.

“Contain what? Separate what?”

Sigmund pointed toward the anvils, anchored to the bedrock beneath the building. More creaking sounded from deep in the rock, speaking of enormous forces exerting against the bolts and posts. Caliph still couldn’t tell where the strain was coming from.

The empty field of space between the anvils rippled with darkness.