The Last Page (102 page)

Not a paramecium. I am an oöcyte, ripened by the book, fertilized in a test tube by the Thae’gn. I am a zygote.

I am not breathing!

Sena felt her body move when she stood up in front of the mirror. She felt perfectly healthy. Perfectly rested. She had never felt like this before,
like she could run for miles, jump over mountains. It was impossible for her to be sad. She sat back down and outlined her eyes and lashes, stroked color into her lips. She changed into her best black dress, which clung to her body like something starved for warmth.

She left the bedroom and went down to the grand hall, one step at a time, watching the marble steps come up at her, hearing the noise increase as she approached the room where Caliph’s corpse lay in state. “I have no time for this,” she whispered to herself.

There was a great crowd of people; a line of lesser gentry passed through an exterior candlelit hall. The music was soft but piercing and everywhere the smell of food.

Curious, she stopped, plucked a glass of wine from a serving tray and lifted it to her lips. She drank, felt the wine go down. She realized she was neither hungry nor thirsty but the wine tasted excellent at the back of her throat. The smell. The tingle. She enjoyed it.

There were people watching her now, scrutinizing her, wondering why she wasn’t mourning. She glared back at them with her scintillating eyes. She glided between them, heading for the bier.

Caliph’s body had already been embalmed. He looked gray and glossy under the candles. She saw through him. All his organs had been removed, turning him into an empty puppet wrapped in expensive silk.

He was dressed loosely in a white robe, like a priest, shining in the light like fresh soap. Sena lifted his sleeve and found the place on his arm where, a month ago, her unswerving desire had wounded him. It pained her. That scar had accumulated so much meaning. It seemed the symbol of their relationship.

Gadriel was pushing through the crowd. But she didn’t care whether he was coming toward her or running away. She whispered abruptly, stopping on a spirant sound. Gadriel stopped. Everything stopped.

But there wasn’t any blood in her veins. She paused only momentarily. Another word blossomed on her lips, this one powerful enough to reach through skin, below tissue, to find holjoules at their source. Sena spoke and suddenly, all the pets in the room detonated. Dignitaries had brought them, fluffy creatures with pedigrees they carried in their arms. Mayor Ashlen’s hounds died where he had leashed them. Cats and daenids and other more exotic things, like the rooks in the garret, all of them disploded with a gory popping sound.

The guests screamed as the wake plunged into a sacrificial bath. Many sobbed and puked. Many more of them ran . . . not because a dozen loyal animals had died but because, on the grand hall bier, Caliph Howl was sitting up.

Metholinate supplies are restored. Masons work to fix damage to the castle and other buildings especially in Barrow Hill, Temple Hill and Daoud’s Bend. The brief warm spell doesn’t last. The rest of the repairs will have to wait for spring.

All the major papers have ruled Caliph’s death an elaborate charade. They say that records of his trauma and time of death could have easily been forged. Several dignitaries from the wake go so far as to tell the press point-blank about the sham.

“We weren’t fooled.”

“It was a disgusting prank and the acting was poor. The murder of animals, family pets, was a revolting over-the-top theatric for which the government will have to pay. A public apology is in order.”

They fill the opinion section of the
Iscan Herald.

And then, of course, there are others who believe.

Caliph feels lost for a while. He reads the documents, sees the canister that supposedly contains his stomach. He talks with the physicians and the embalmer but all of them seem frightened and quickly go away.

He remembers the jolt when the gun-stone must have hit the deck, remembers the metal sticking from the middle of his chest. He had remained conscious as his men turned the airship home, running from the battle, engines pounding to get the High King home. He had been conscious even when they were struck again over the city . . . so close . . . only a hundred yards from the mooring deck. And he had felt his stomach pitch as the
Byun-Ghala
had finally lost power, drifting into the walls of Isca Castle with graceful, violent repercussions.

The memory of the impact comes to him in third person, at a speed that feels dreamily slow. Engines ripping through gas cells, officers flying over lightweight rigid frameworks. His agonizing stomach pain finally . . . finally goes away.

Days pass and the papers spin one journalistic counterpoint after another. Mostly, however, they focus on the thousands and thousands of dead.

Sena stayed out of public sight.

Caliph watched her spend hours on end poring over the
C
srym T
. She had sent a huge order to the book buyer, calling for a veritable library to be brought back to Isca Castle. Caliph was forced to send several zeppelins to haul the enormous collection in.

Surprisingly, he didn’t have trouble believing that he had died. There were distinct memories of the time after the zeppelin crash that he didn’t talk about. Who would believe him anyway? Except Sena?

Gadriel had tendered his resignation. So had the royal physicians. Almost all the servants that had worked closest to the High King and his queen had left, seeking employment elsewhere. Only Yrisl and Alani stayed.

Sometimes Caliph felt like he was functioning in a dream, thinking back to those hours where he was certainly someplace else. Someplace far away from Isca. During those moments, he found himself touching his chest where the duralumin beam had been and thinking about Cameron Howl and his uncle’s book.

The worm gang murders had been nearly forgotten. The journalist who took the litho-slide had become a casualty of the attack and his story turned to hearsay, brushed aside amid new turmoil surrounding the postwar and the tragedy at Burt.

The litho-slide, now property of the Iscan government, tormented Caliph for a while. He pondered the possibility of turning himself in. Sigmund had told him it was Zane Vhortghast who had replaced all the caged-up cats with human beings. It was a story that carried the ring of truth. Certainly Sigmund must have capitulated but Caliph didn’t want to think about that. He didn’t want to think about anything pertaining to the war. Instead, he shut down Glôssok and moved Sigmund Dulgensen to another project.

Caliph couldn’t feel the guilt anymore.

I died for Stonehold.

On a morning just a few days after his wake, Caliph met Sena in the library for breakfast. The meeting had jumped out at him from his itinerary for the day. The thought of her scheduling it with the new seneschal made him smile faintly as he entered the huge chilly room.

Sena looked up and smiled at him from across the hazy blue space. She didn’t move. She wasn’t breathing. His own breath was frosty in the air. Caliph walked toward her, studying her in that gray square of light below the window. Where shadows clung along her neck and beneath her arm,
he could see the pale designs, the platinum tattoos that painted her with specular. So fluid and cunning. They glittered every time she moved. She had told him everything, about how they were the same kind of glyphs as those found in his uncle’s book.

The closer he got, the wider her smile became until finally, he reached out and touched her. She let him feel the lines as he always did. They were nothing like the raised ridges of scar tissue, tactually they were no different from her skin . . . except that they were cold. When he crossed a line he felt it tingle under his fingertips. Fleshy warmth veined with soft icy designs.

He could rest against her. The warmth of her body compensated. The designs were delicate and thin.

“You scheduled breakfast?” He asked it with obvious amusement.

“Yeah. I scheduled breakfast.” She got up from her stool and led him by the hand through the shelves to a great fireplace. There was a chaise and coffee table and a perfect breakfast spread out beside the flames.

“It’s cold in here,” said Caliph.

“I know.”

“Fire’s for my benefit?”

“Our benefit.”

Caliph sat down. Sena let her slippers drop and crawled up beside him on the chaise. She plucked a berry from the tray and put it in his mouth.

“I want something,” she said while he was chewing.

“More books?”

She shushed him. “It’s hard to explain what I want . . . the macroscopic . . . the microscopic. All those physicists trying to manipulate objects from the outside looking in. They can’t help it because their eyes are like stone. They can’t help the grains slipping through their fingers. Can you imagine? Creating from inside? An inflow of matter, without wind, attaching itself, precisely, without flaw, without smoke or machinery? Attaching itself to your thought, your intention, to the soul of what you’re trying to create?”

“What?” Caliph looked at her quizzically.

“It’s the evolution of engineering . . . perfect atomic alignment that transcends matter as we know it. Perfect alignment. Absolute attraction.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Caliph.” Her tougue peeked out between her lips as she wrestled with the words. “I want to have a baby.”

Caliph picked up a pastry and looked into her jeweled eyes, her perfectly sculpted face so convincingly inlaid with chromium. She sounded crazy. She hadn’t been herself since his funeral. He didn’t know if it was
possible. He had listened to her chest many times in the past few days after they had made love and heard the silence, the absence of her heartbeat. She could always wear him out and her breathing never changed. She breathed for him, intentionally, to comfort him, to keep it as close to normal as it could be. But she didn’t grow tired. She never had to catch her breath.

The only sounds she made were for his benefit.

Caliph felt disjoint. He didn’t know whether she was really alive. Or whether she was really Sena. She seemed to be Sena. She had all of Sena’s memories. She had brought him back, given him life, if he was to believe everything that had happened in the last few days.

He looked at her; swallowed his berry. “A baby,” he said. “Are you sure we can . . . ?”

“I don’t know.” Sena’s smile faded. She looked down into his lap. Her hands tugged softly at his belt.