The Last Page (13 page)

“Who are you?”

Alani stepped back; lamplight caked his face suddenly like butter. Caliph recognized him. He couldn’t find the circumstance but he had definitely seen him before, wearing different clothes . . . a uniform.

“Turn around. Go to Stonehold.” Then the man shifted position and abruptly walked away.

Caliph let him go. He was too frightened to run after him. He was still trying to find a setting to pair with the bald head, pocked cheeks and well-kept goatee.

A thin man in his fifties.

It had to have been at college. Mentally, Caliph dressed him in baggy pants and a shirt. No. He imagined Alani in Desdae Hall selling books. A professor? A cook? Maybe in town at the theater or Grume’s . . . No. He tried a different angle:
who could have known he was going to see Sena? Who would have had access to the letter? Who could have seen the map?

Caliph searched his mind, trying to remember the faces at the campus post office. All he found were the pouts and freckles of two or three sullen women.

It seemed useless. Whoever Alani was, he obviously knew both where Caliph Howl was supposed to be and where he was going.
Maybe I should turn around
. . .

Caliph stood in the dark for a long time, wondering, doubting.

Finally he decided. On his first step he rebuked the can that had given him away, kicking it fiercely. It seemed to float rather than fly, barely scraping the bricks before vanishing into the dark. On his second step he set his feet toward the cement steps that led down into Crow’s Eye. He was not going back.

At a point just north of the barren arches of Tibi
n, Caliph could see the Walls of Tue, black and misty through miles of humid sky. It was the eleventh of P
sh and he had reached the crossroads.

Sena would have no way of knowing he had stayed another semester. Maybe her invitation had expired. She might even be with someone else by now. The thought thickened the back of his throat.

Caliph wished he had brought a friend, someone to make it less obvious that he had traveled all this way just to see her. The thought of knocking on her door alone terrified him.

There was a crumbling thread of trail that climbed from the crossroads up into Tue. When Caliph topped the final switchback, he was gasping. Five thousand feet below, the landscape swept away, creating an indigo vista of lakes and trees. Caliph dug Sena’s map out of his pack and looked at it with some dismay. A nostalgic smile haunted his lips.

“Can’t draw so well,” he whispered to himself.

A damp breeze swelled and flapped out of the lowlands.

Caliph looked up from the crackling paper and studied his surroundings. The sweat from his climb had chilled, inducing vast tracts of horripilated flesh across his arms and back. At least he told himself it was the temperature. A freakish mood had settled, oozing from the angular, purpurean shadows around the Stones. Caliph walked toward them, pulled by an itching in his brain. He touched one like a child on a dare. It felt slick and cool, the crowded patterns stained by an unidentifiable pers residue. There was nothing recognizable in the carvings. As if the very subject matter were distortion. Flux.

The air felt sticky, smelled sweet.

Caliph shuddered.

Maybe he had heard it: that insane high-pitched gibbering he didn’t want to acknowledge. Whether it really existed or not was a matter he might debate later over pints when the horrible subtlety of the sound had dissolved into memory. For now, Caliph preferred to label it a trick or figment of the wind.

He left the monument and trudged uphill. A meadow above the Stones tossed mournfully, tumbled down from a small wood that Caliph recognized from Sena’s map. He scanned the trunks, looking for a trail and found one.

He checked his compass and gripped the paper, wading through the whipping weeds and into the wood. Giant drops were splattering everywhere, on boulders, bark and patches of stony dirt. The warm musty rain assaulted him like soft slimy food hurled in a theater.

Just ahead, a small cottage came into view and Caliph made a dash for it. Crimson flowers in a barrel drooped darkly by the door. A window had been left open and lace curtains slapped about like desperate fingers.

Caliph thumped hard only to have the door swing open under his blows.

He fumbled into a broad kitchen, pungent with spice and tried to shut the door but the latch seemed broken. He set his pack on the table and slammed the sash on the moaning window.

Caliph wiped water from his face and began winding the thermal crank. After the dials started glowing, he clicked a chemiostatic lantern and held it up to examine the room.

Delicate chairs and copper kettles poised like swans. A pair of tall soft boots sat crumpled by the door. The cottage smelled of her, but in a dusty faint way. Panning the lantern, he could see that the floor by the window had been ruined by weather.

“Sena?”

His voice, coinciding with a blast of wind, seemed to rattle the leaded glass. The cottage was tiny. A brown tailless cat blinked at him from the stairs, but there was something else, something dark and somber on the floor.

Grume streaked the floorboards, rusty and dry. Caliph found more at the threshold. He backed into the kitchen, feeling the warmth drain from his face.

Caliph reexamined the front door. The lock had been broken, but the bolt had splintered the frame as though hit from the inside.

Caliph shook off his queasiness. There was no body. He poked his face above the second floor and peered at Sena’s bedroom, noting the carved headboards. Maybe she’d made it to a hospital in Sandren. Maybe the blood wasn’t hers.

A deafening crack of thunder split the air just the other side of the roof. Caliph’s body hair prickled.

The sound of torrential rain on the vague and somehow unsettling geometry of the windows lessened.

He panned the lantern, scanning the room. His name leapt out from a corkboard in the kitchen. Plucking the pushpin, he quickly read the note:

Caliph:

Currently, hospitals employ cytoclastic kymographs. Unless new doctors emerge, redundant therapy heightens egregious symptoms, taking all intrinsic remedies south
. . .

The old game.
C
-urrently,
h
-ospitals
e
-mploy
c
-ytoclastic
k
-ymographs . . .
check under the stairs
. He spun immediately, took two steps forward and knelt down.

A small latch had been cleverly hidden at the corner of the first step. Caliph unhooked it and a crack appeared along the baseboard. He raised his eyebrows, gripped the lip of the bottom step and stood up. The entire staircase rose smoothly into the air like the lid of a counter-weighted trunk. Underneath, a second set of steps descended into a narrow pit lined with mortared stones. He felt immediately apprehensive about what he might find.

The chemiostatic light spilled like old wash water down the secret steps; it picked out the silver glints of bottles and flasks from the cellar gloom. Caliph swung the hood around and the light lapped over a bookcase filled with volumes, a table cluttered with powders, charcoal drawing sticks and dried roots.

“Witch.”

The word came softly to his lips.

Upstairs, the hinges on the kitchen door creaked in the wind. Caliph paused, listening, but nothing stirred. When he turned his attention back to the table of powdered roots, he noticed
The Fall of Bendain
sitting in the middle of the workspace with a fingerprint inked in blood in the center of its cover.

It wasn’t the real thing. She had asked for his forgery of
The Fall of Bendain
after Roric had left school.

He picked it up. The blood stopped here. There was a bookmark. He opened to it and discovered that it was actually a note addressed to him.

He scowled. It was dated nearly a year ago and everything about it was wrong.

Tes 13, Year of the Search

Caliph,

I’m not paranoid, really. This is just in case something goes wrong, which of course it won’t because if it does I’ll probably wind up dead
. . .
so this is really pointless anyway.

Sick, I know. Still, there’s a bit of time to kill out here on the edge of the world especially when it’s been snowing for four days.

Long waits can kill you.

I wish it was just the two of us again, battling the brigade of books, picking up the splinters of broken stone noses. For a kiss I’d give my soul.

Anyway, I’ll probably show this to you and we’ll both laugh. I
just thought I should let you know how much I loved you—since I never told you.

Things slip by unsaid and you regret it later. “Opportunities are the blossoms of seconds,” Belman used to say and “Eternal love orders the heart.” I say: love is the origin of theft.

—Hynns
ll