The Last Page (66 page)

“And what’s that?” asked Caliph, pointing toward the void.

“Mother of Mizraim, Caliph—what did you hire me for? Solvitriol power, man.” He slapped Caliph in the chest lightly with the back of his hand. “Souls. Remember?”

Now caliph saw them. At the center of each anvil a tiny window of pastel light gleamed fitfully from a bubble of glass embedded in the steel.

“Remember how I told you I had some ideas. Stuff nobody else’s ever tried. Well, we built a cold tank like they used in the south to freeze light. That’s how I managed to separate one. I mean that’s how I managed to split a soul . . . in half.”

“What?”

“Yeah. It’s crazy. You get your arm cut off but not part of your soul. Fucking difficult. Splitting the unsplittable. I ain’t a priest but according to the blueprints souls have . . . high viscosity and they’re independently
self-attractive—magnetized to their own unique structures. Shit. They’re indestructible.

“Anyway you can trick ’em out for a few seconds with devastating cold, plasma diversion I call it, when the attractive charge goes kinda limp. Bottle ’em up like soda pop and put ’em in the containment housing. Whoa! Watch out.”

A shuddering creak went through the cement floor.

“We’re going to have to hook up a big-ass crane to pull these little chums apart. Stress fluctuates between the two housings with active torque and an attractive force of not less than twenty thousand tons. That means the little bugger inside the glass—which is holomorphically unbreakable by the way and extraordinarily expensive to make—is actively trying to twist ’round on the bolts, swivel the housing on a path of least resistance back to its other half. We made the mistake of fusing the glass cells with the metal housing in this model. Anyway, not bad for a stray calico, eh? Meow.

“Now check this action out. Here’s housing number two.”

Caliph walked toward a table with a strange device on it. A disk of black metal housed a solvitriol cell on either side, back to back, in little cages that allowed the glass orbs containing the souls to turn independent of the metal housing.

“The whole thing’s made of tunsia but still not as expensive as that huge contraption over there. See this tunsia plate here could probably support almost a dozen tons of force applied to one side but that’s not what’s going on. What’s going on is the thrust of both cells pushing against the plate from both sides with equal force. They actually keep each other trapped and the bulbs are free to spin.”

Caliph watched the cells revolve slowly, grinding with immense pressure against the tunsia plate between them. They seemed to growl as the soul fragments turned their prisons against the metal disk, furious to undo the division.

“They can’t try alternate directions,” said Sigmund, further explaining why the second housing worked. “They don’t have any power beyond the holomorphic glass. They can spin the cells, but the attractive force between them isn’t a choice. They’re not consciously trying to meld. It’s just some kind of transdimensional physics, some law that says split souls beeline for one another.” He lifted the plate and spun it in his hands. The soul fragments must have adjusted instantaneously to his sudden dynamics, never pushing in a direction other than toward their better half.

“What you’re looking at here could be modified, rigged with springs
and other power cells, wired up and housed in a solitary casing. What you’re looking at here is the fundamental heart of a solvitriol bomb.”

Caliph stood speechless, waiting for Sigmund to go on.

Sigmund smiled. “Yeah. What you do is create a mechanism that allows the two orbs to come together, a hole in the plate or an inclined plane or some shit like that. You can roll ’em toward a point of contact with hydraulics or . . . well I haven’t got that part figured out just yet. But once the glass touches it’s over. Absolute attraction.” He rapped the plate of tunsia. “This is quarter inch. But even holomorphically tempered glass isn’t going to hold split souls a sixteenth of an inch apart. Attraction between the fragments increases to a kind of snapping point. That’s where you get your explosion.

“Over there,” he shook his hand carelessly at the steel anvils, “you’ve got twenty thousand tons of attractive force. Here,” he rapped the plate, “you’ve got grundles more.”

“How big?” asked Caliph. “How big of an explosion?”

“Well . . .” Sigmund seemed to whine as though he had misled Caliph’s imagination. “It’s not an explosion like you’re thinking. It’s a ripple. Like take this beaker for instance.” It was filled nearly to the top with water. He took the top of a bun left over from a day-old sandwich and brushed a rain of tiny dark seeds into the beaker. They formed a carpet along the surface of the water. “Like I said, I ain’t no priest, but let’s say them little seeds is us, suspended in some spiritual layer we can’t even detect. Along comes a solvitriol bomb.” Sigmund let slide a thick drop of water from his finger over the beaker. It fell with a plop, disrupting the surface tension of the fluid, shaking the seeds like beetles from a rug. They fell, floating down into the bottom of the beaker.

“See, the seeds don’t get blown up. You don’t feel it when a solvitriol bomb goes off. Buildings don’t break apart and go somersaulting through the air. There isn’t any discernable shockwave. But everybody. Everybody falls down.” Sigmund, shirtless in his blackened overalls, scratched his meaty arm while chewing at his beard.

“Some invisible inexorable tide comes in and washes your soul out of your body like a mussel from its shell. And you’re dead. You’re meat lying on the bottom of that beaker, nothing left to hold you up,” said Sigmund. “That’s what solvitriol bombs can do.”

For a while Caliph and Sigmund shared industrial-strength coffee mixed with brandy from Sigmund’s flask. They stared at the tunsia plate separating immeasurable opposing forces and listened to the foundations creak beneath the lab.

“What’s that dark ripple between the housings?” asked Caliph.

“The path of attraction,” said Sigmund. “You can’t see it in the smaller housing because the cells are just too close together. But it’s there. Displacing light. That’s all it is. I’ve been trying to find a way to predict how the cells will spin their housing so I can use the path of attraction to calculate some kind of endless cycle, you know . . . like a perpetual motion machine. But it’s still too dangerous to try.”

Caliph nodded. He asked all kinds of questions. What the attractive force measured at a distance of one, two, even three miles. What the ethereal blast radius of a solvitriol bomb would be. Sigmund had sketchy answers but promised he would do the calculations and get back to him in a couple days.

Their conversation eventually turned to David Thacker.

“I would never have pegged old Dave as a traitor,” muttered Sigmund.

“Nor I,” said Caliph.

“I suppose when you gathered up his things you found the second set of blueprints.”

“What?”

“Yeah,” said Sigmund. “I had David draw up a copy of the plans in case . . . well . . . in case you weren’t shooting straight.” He shrugged. “I just didn’t want you thinking I was planning something behind your back. It was just a safety net, that’s all.”

Caliph frowned and broke into a sudden sweat. He pushed his alcoholic coffee away.

“I had . . . I had David’s room searched. He didn’t have any blueprints, Sigmund.”

Sigmund laughed. “Sure he did. I told him myself to hold on to ’em if . . .” His voice trailed off.

“All he had was a box of creepy papers and a stack of forty gold gryphs.”

“Gold?” Sigmund was incredulous. “David was broke as a toilet pipe in Kaoul. He couldn’t afford socks!”

“So he sold the plans,” said Caliph.

“Unbelievable.”

“The Pandragonians know,” Caliph said. “They know and I bet they now have proof that we have access to solvitriol power.”

“Ideas who the buyer was?”

Caliph stood up.

“Yeah. I’ll see you in a couple days.”

When Caliph returned from Glôssok and touched down on the glowing zeppelin deck, N
s was already dying.

He saw the poor cat from across the vast expanse of concrete, lying on its side, the hazy whirring shape of a glimbender hovering over it. He ran, tried to chase it away, but the thing had already ejaculated its larva deep into N
s’ brain.

By the time Caliph crossed the deck, the furtive hairy eye on wings had gone, darting into the night.

N
s lay breathing quietly, his life force winding down as the hungry slugs squirmed inside his skull.

Rolling in a bath of their own digestive acids, the glimbender grubs would make short work of their host. After they’d eaten the cat’s brain they would spin silken cocoons inside the cranium, gestating for a month or more while the fur and skin moldered away. When they hatched, they’d come fumbling out of eye sockets or through the jaw.

There was nothing to be done.

Caliph called for Gadriel who summoned Sena to the deck. When she arrived, she wept and paced and stroked her dying pet.

Caliph tried to comfort her but she was inconsolable. Gadriel knelt with a tin of tissues at the ready.

Slowly, N
s’ breathing thinned out and settled into strange seizure-like quivers that served no respiratory function.