The Last Page (83 page)

Terrified of Caliph’s return she shut the ancient book with restive fingers and began a series of mindless preparations.

She took a bath. She oiled her ringlets, her sex, misted her flesh with the pore-clenching chill of Tebeshian perfume. She got dressed. The clothes she picked were diabolic. She knew just which things against her skin might drive the High King mad.

She checked her glowing watch four times as the room began to blush. The rosy light faded quickly and the sumptuous shadows around the bed turned brown.

The room cooled. She called a servant to light a fire despite the groaning foment in the radiator pipes. For a while, she sat mutely, preoccupied before the mirror. She penciled in her eyes and lips while her intestines wrung themselves through a series of algetic knots.

Her reflection was resplendent. Fishnet black and satin covered up her
fear. Laces on her corset and sequential cunning straps battened down her persistent bent to fly. Hair and eyes, gold and sapphire, lips of buccal ruby: she was something gleaming but restrained, dark jewels set in velveteen soot.

A beguilement,
she thought,
that he will see right through.

As the grandfather clock tolled seventeen, the storm stilled and the clouds opened on the night. She left the cluttered vanity and poised near the western windows, faced but hardly looking at the magnesium fizzle of starlight.

The room was quiet when she turned her head in the direction of the door. A figure had materialized soundlessly, shrouded in the doughy darkness that stretched like something clotting in the corner of the room.

She held her breath.

A wayward glistening twist of her perfect hair dangled, catching firelight. Sena brushed it self-consciously, presenting her lure. She calculated the forward motion of her hips, pushing her pose over the edge of art, spilling her presentation into the void of breathless concupiscence.

She moved as though blown, ignoring her heart that twitched like something in a snare.

She had already taken several steps when she realized it wasn’t Caliph at the door.

A thin man in Desdae’s raven-colored scholar robes seemed to hover just above the floor. He watched her with Cimmerian eyes. Narrow, pallid lips overdrew a baleful smile and hair as fine as cotton candy trembled in a cat’s-paw off the sea.

The door opened behind him, swung through his semiform and erased him from the room.

Caliph stood nearly where the old man had been, slack jawed, gawking.

Despite her obvious effect on him, Sena’s poise had vaporized. Whether the old man had been real remained for some successive mental debate. Right now the moment of her opportunity was in jeopardy.

She forced her nerves to trickle back. She would not allow herself to lose this second chance—not until she had made a sterling assault.

Already she could see that Caliph’s inarticulate stupor had begun to harden into skepticism. Skepticism that he hurled at her with excruciating efficiency.

It startled her—to be an outsider.

Caliph seemed newly minted, as if she was seeing him for the first time.
Palan’s tail,
she thought,
he’s changed! He’s changed and I never even noticed.
She imagined the cruelty that must have passed like iced
croissants around his table every morning. Those meetings. The endless plotting. Everyone he thought he could trust had sold him out. Even she. And now she was here, uninvited—and she couldn’t blame him, she couldn’t fault him in the least.

He walked past her, toward wardrobes still filled with bodices and lace.

“I’m a bitch,” she whispered. It stopped him in his tracks.

He turned like a weapon on a turret: tensile, dark and cocked. Sena saw him scratch his arm.

“Not good enough.”

Although his words were nasty and deliberate she realized all of a sudden that they weren’t true. It was like she had climbed inside his head. She could tell that the sight of her was enough and she could hear him berating himself.
You uxorious beaten little man!
His eyes gave it away: how he loathed himself right now. His face told her that any arrows she fired would kill him on the spot.

She saw him understand that she knew. It was instantaneous. Like telepathy. And to her astonishment, he didn’t attempt a charade or try to cover it up. It made her want him in a callow, unexpected way. The expression on his face was beyond her capability to exploit.

It was awkward, embarrassing and thankfully without audience. Instead of victory, Sena felt like she had melted. Her sense of vulnerability ballooned. She couldn’t help it. She was ashamed of the tenderness that had jelled the air.

“You’re right. You are a bitch . . .”

Tenderness noted. Appreciated. Temporarily set aside.

“I was going to leave. I didn’t think you . . .” she shook her head, “would take me back.”

It was a safe thing to say. Moronic and simple and clichéd. After all, Caliph’s expression had made it clear that he did, that he
had already
taken her back.

Caliph said a few more sour words.

Sena fired back once or twice, explained herself with competent precision. For his part, he did an admirable job of remaining cold.

The parrying went on for two minutes at most, consisting mostly of disingenuous threats.

Finally Caliph sighed to indicate that he was done.

“You can stay here. I’ll sleep downstairs.”

He confiscated a pillow and left the room.

That he told her where he was going and didn’t take a blanket, that he gave the bed to her, were all she needed to know for certain that she had been forgiven.

Her heart started beating again. She knew by any stretch that he had let her off easy. It bothered her.

She followed him from the room, watched him trudge down the grand stairs and plop down in front of the first floor’s fireplace.

He was sulking. A sack of anger on the leather sofa. But she was trained for this. It would be like pressing a deep aposteme, forcing an eruption, getting at the core. She would squeeze his anger out. It would be surgical. Tonight it would be pår
n and . . . it would be pår
n because she loved him.

She went down. When she crawled on top of him, when she perched for him in poses that were ludicrous, he didn’t look away. Her motions were smooth and daedal. Exquisite. Outlandish. It was a pantomime, a rising chaos that she stylized and turned, gripped professionally and molded into perfect form. It wasn’t just a striptease or a succubus straddling a man in the huge echoing hall. It wasn’t a pair of imperiled creatures grinding blindly on the edge of salvation. It wasn’t that. It was Sena’s adaptation. A slow-moving, living sculpture. She crafted it with subsecondal precision and gave it to Caliph as a gift.

He didn’t push it away or ridicule it as another cheap pretense. She steeled herself in case he did. Instead he accepted it, embraced it and eventually wore himself out against it, collapsing into unconsciousness that lasted far beyond the dawn.

Caliph realized that Gadriel had found them. They were draped across each other, barely covered by a blanket of black leveret. The High Seneschal had already established a perimeter around the room, using sentries to block every door and passageway that might admit a curious member of the castle staff.

Discreet bits of Sena’s outfit had been swept up and whisked away.

“I’ve commissioned breakfast,” said the seneschal. A bowl of neatly rolled washcloths steamed in his hand like an offering. Two servants erected a set of carved dressing screens, set a stack of plush towels on the table and promptly disappeared. There were slippers and soap and a basin of scalding water at the ready. “King Lewis has arrived from Vale Briar . . . on schedule. The weather is mild so I set him in the north portico.”

A silver tray floated in, laden with coffee, toothbrushes and the morning’s freshly toasted paper.

Along with the
Herald
, a copy of
The Varlet’s Pike
lay ominously on the tray. Caliph picked it up, bemused by what story it could contain that would prompt the seneschal to actually purchase such a scandal sheet specifically for the High King’s eye.

When Caliph read it, he was stunned not so much by the content of the article as by the speed of its being turned into print.

A source inside Isca Castle indicated that the seventh of Kam brought the return of the High King’s witch. Refusing to be named, the source claimed the grand hall was the site of an alleged voluble reunion between the High King and his mistress who disappeared late last week.

When asked exactly what voluble meant, the source replied, “I wish they’d save their disgusting sybaritism for the bedroom. They ought to be restrained . . .”

A note was stuck underneath this text, penned in Gadriel’s precise hand that read,
Don’t worry. I’ve already found the source of this leak and the culprit has been terminated from our employ.
—G.

Well,
thought Caliph,
I guess I haven’t won over all the staff after all.

King Lewis was reading the same page when Caliph met him twenty minutes later on the portico. The gleaming corpulent man smiled and rose ponderously. He laid the paper aside and shook Caliph’s hand.

“Freedom of the press.” He grinned.

Caliph returned the smile, noticeably abridged and chilled. “Interesting preference in journalism. I’m sure
The Varlet’s Pike
can offer you several good wallows at my expense. Would you like me to order you a subscription?”

“No.” Lewis fanned his palms. “Already have one, thanks.”

“Great. To be honest I’d hate to itemize that one on the books.”

“You’ve gotten comfortable quickly.” Lewis resumed his seat and hoisted a jelly roll.

“You think so? That’s funny. Comfortable is one of the few words I would
not
have used to describe my position.”

Lewis bit and chewed and spoke before he swallowed.

“I heard our meeting is being put off until tonight?”

“I’ve arranged a hunt today . . . for your entertainment,” said Caliph. “This evening, after we return we can discuss the business that’s brought you to Isca.”

“How excellent!” Lewis’ voice dispensed disingenuous surprise. “And the prince of Tentinil has come?”

“Yes. Prince Mortiman and several others. Like you, they’ve very recently arrived . . . by zeppelin.”

Lewis took another bite.

“Absolutely ticky!”

The morning sun fired the interior of the castle battlements like a kiln. Its fingers stretched down slowly to warm the men waiting in the courtyard.

They were mounted on horseback, dressed in traditional Naneman hunting clothes.

Caliph had asked Sena to come—an invitation she readily accepted.

Over the last several hours an irrational umbrage had slithered back into his heart, springing from the notion that Sena had returned to harvest her own exoneration.

He tried to chase the feeling away, but it remained. A stigma of suspicion
that blurred the once crisp light in which he held her. She hadn’t really stolen anything. She had asked for his forgiveness and he had given it. How could he now begrudge her?

And still . . .