The Last Page (94 page)

But despite Alani’s pride in a mission well done, when he reached Miskatoll, his hope faded. Like reading ahead in a novel, he knew what was going to happen. He could skip all the intervening chapters of pointless violence and exposition and know with the solid assurance that his many years of experience provided, that nothing Caliph Howl could do would change the inevitable.

Alani omitted this grim personal assessment in his note to the High King and wrote simply that he had discovered the date and time of Saergaeth’s main attack. He sent this (and only this) information back to the High King.

Caliph received the note within two hours, pulling it from the exhausted hawk’s leg. Alani had cranked the tiny golden screws on the chemiostatic governor in its brain to maximize speed.

Day after tomorrow,
read the note,
second of Thay. Saergaeth will be coming.

Caliph’s eyes wrestled with the crumpled hazy darkness of the western mountains at the limit of his sight. He took tablets from a red-coated physician on the
Byun-Ghala
who assured him they would moderate the pain. He chewed them like candy but his discomfort never flagged. His stomach gurgled with acid.

He was headed home.

After visiting his generals, ferrying the prince to Tentinil, completing a long schedule of meetings, Caliph was finally headed home. He had made every decision he could make.

He shredded the note from Alani in his palm and let it fall like the first snowflakes from the
Byun-Ghala
’s outer deck.

The zeppelin powered south, clearing a geothermic swamp and gliding over a jumbled pile of hills gone bald with autumn brown.

In the fast-moving zeppelin, the landscape never stayed the same. The drumlins that had just replaced the swamp receded in minutes like diseased gums, exposing the blackened incisors of Murkbell and Growl Mort, basking in their own slaver by the sea. The industrial districts offered drooling abscesses that outpoured spew as yellow as infected pus. Caliph could see the grime-encrusted seawall, the arches of the great arcade. Like a sleeping dark but restless thing, Isca seemed to slither into view. But Caliph didn’t wonder if it was worth saving.

The
Byun-Ghala
motored in quickly and moored on the deck at Isca Castle. He instructed Yrisl to deploy all remaining engines on the city’s western flank. Not the trundling lightweights . . . but the juggernauts. The big heavies.

As the airship docked, Yrisl jumped the gap, not waiting for the plank, and ran without pretense to obey.

Caliph
did
wait for the plank. He was exhausted and wanted only one thing: two hours. Two hours of sleep.

He headed to his room.

When he entered he found Sena looking wild.

She was draped in the tub, hair pulled up, covered with bubbles, cradling a bottle.

“You’re late,” she slurred.

“Really?” He pulled off his gloves and boots. “By whose clock?” He had already noticed her eyes.

“Mine.” Her voice was repugnantly wanton. “Come fuck me.” The bottle slipped, disgorged its blush into the bath.

The radiator was boiling and the bedroom felt like a roasting pit. Caliph pulled off his coat. He twisted a knob that isolated the room from the rest of the boiler’s circulatory system.

Her eyes!

Caliph walked toward the tub, speechless.

They were dazzling and awful. Ringed with bruises and glowing in shadow: molten blue. The closer he got the more he saw, little flashes, tiny engravings that caught the light. They were exquisite, without a pupil. Pure blue. The iris had grown shut. Caliph was horrified. Her eyes looked like jewels.

Sena stumbled from the tub. She nearly fell but Caliph caught her by the arm. Her towel hung from a nearby chair. He jerked it free and draped it over her shoulders.

She bit her lip as if in concentration and made it to the bed.

Her body smelled of perfume, soap and wine, glossy with the creamy lace of bubbles gathered on her skin. Her form unrolled, escaped the
towel’s rubric. Caliph gazed at the gleaming provocative compilation of her parts. He felt disjunct, as if part of him was still standing on the
Byun-Ghala
staring at war charts. But her topography mapped a place far removed from anything that reeked of war. A rolling golden landscape. Left shoulder dipping sleekly into waist. The supple hollow where her skin grew taut across the pelvic arch.

Caliph ran his fingers over her. She stretched at his attention, slid her legs along each other with the soft whisper of skin.

Maybe in the morning she wouldn’t remember him kissing her like he was starving for her mouth. Maybe in the morning they would talk and sort things out. She wouldn’t be drunk. She would explain her eyes. He would apologize for leaving her without good-bye. Maybe she would forgive him and he would forgive her and she would tell him, finally, that their love wasn’t something base; that they weren’t just a pair of junkies whipped by what they craved or a set of people using one another for comfort or power or anything else.

Caliph trembled and held her like something on the verge of being lost, like something irreplaceable that he couldn’t save or hold onto tightly enough. Afterward he cried.

Sena woke up alone. Meetings and war formed her primary suspects. She didn’t bother getting out of bed.

Last night remained a blur. She smiled, pulled a heavy shadow toward her and opened the
C
srym T
. The day passed quietly with the knowledge that she had sent an ancient ball of blackened numbers like a meteor into Skellum Hall. If Megan couldn’t or wouldn’t do it, she knew the Eighth House would soon dispatch a qloin. Retribution was inevitable.

During the past few days, Sena had killed things, used a vast amount of holojoules to drape the castle in a veil. Her eyes could not penetrate the Eighth House and she hoped the inverse was also true. She kept the shylock close at hand.

In the evening, a servant brought her dinner and a bottle of ridiculously expensive sherry. She hardly touched the meat. She took the bottle to the window and stood looking at the distant west. Since she had been in Lewis’ head, tenuous loyalties had begun to blossom in her chest, something she had never felt before, a weak and unfounded brand of nationalism. It seemed ridiculous. Her allegiance had always been to no one but herself.

She flicked her kyru out, cut the foil below the lip and popped the cork. The smell of Stonehold wafted from the bottle’s throat. She wiped the top and poured a taste of her new country, her new home.

Her eyes clawed through the mountains—past the war, but parliament, all of Skellum, remained dark. She could sense the chaos, sense the Sisterhood changing hands. She guessed her proof had been a raging success. Now all that remained was to find a way to use what she had learned to help Caliph win this war!

Sena swallowed two ounces and poured herself another glass.
Stonehold will be my home,
she thought.

A shadow in the room whispered to her, urging her to lug the
C
srym T
from its perch, open it and begin to read.

That night, winter fell like an anvil. From Kjnardag’s glittering slopes a cold snap stabbed south and crackled in the Iscan Bay. Snow descended. A parasitic host bedaubed the north with grotesque white.

Cold inveigled every cranny of the city. Steeples, bathrooms and bedrooms of the poor became its nests. Buckets of frozen night soil were tossed from door stoops of tenements devoid of plumbing. They bobbed, half cones of solid filthy ice, thudding dully along fouled concrete tunnels. The watch dumped chemicals in the sewer to keep them mostly liquid.

Caliph looked out from his study windowsill that had draped impossibly during the night. All across the skyline surreal sculptures drooled, white as frosting, defying gravity in a bake shop of the mad.

As predicted, when Isca’s stench had been dulled by snow, when things seemed almost sanctified and suddenly still, all-out war erupted on the western plains.

Word reached Caliph for the second time, a correction from Alani confirming that airships were lifting out of hangars in the border keeps far away: one day early. Irony of ironies, he attended one last meeting. Then, by hawk and word of mouth, he disseminated to his generals the signal that would finally put his plan in motion.

He felt numb.

Vaguely, he became aware of transitions taking place in the streets below the castle.

People couldn’t flee. Instead, they braced themselves and hunkered down, cracking un-laughed-at jokes in order to distance themselves from outright hysteria. He could see Octul Box from the parapet, where grocers’ shelves sold bare by half past six and storefronts closed as owners hurried home.