The Last Page (21 page)

“And crew size?”

“Sorry. Yes. A ship like this could run with anywhere from nine up to a dozen or so men. The larger ones range from eighteen to fifty.”

“How does it run?”

“The engines? They’re electric. Off monster chemiostatic cells toward the aft. They funnel air in different directions, over the fins and such. This one has a range of over a thousand miles but the big ones can go several times that. We’d like to get our hands on solvitriol or the coriolistic technology they have in the south. But so far no luck.” Yrisl looked at Vhortghast who seemed not to be listening.

“We’re lagging behind,” said Vhortghast with thin cynicism. “Shouldn’t we be out with the others? Mingling?”

“Absolutely,” said Caliph with underscored conformity. Mentally he tacked
you shit
onto the end. Caliph walked out onto the wide balcony that overlooked the sprawl.

Light from the enormous chemiostatic cells could be seen faintly, reflecting off the spines.

Behind and to the west, West Gate formed a swollen rupture in the city wall, spewing buildings out toward the farmlands and hills like the contents of an overripe blackhead. “That’s West Fen,” said Vhortghast.

Caliph allowed his annoyance to show. “Thank you, Zane. Isn’t that one of Isca’s two external boroughs?”

“My apologies,” said the spymaster.

Eastward, the sky moved with a grisly ivory color. Between the zeppelin and the indistinct haze of the dockside boroughs rose and fell the undulant jumble of Maruchine, Grue Hill and Os Sacrum. To the south, the long squamous blocks of Candleshine knitted together like cells under a monolcular.

Caliph remembered Sena standing beside him in the musty lab, her
perfume purling up into his face as he leaned forward, pretending to look at pig muscle on the slide.

“There’s Cripple Gate!” shouted the woman in black, still clinging to her enslaved husband. She pointed at a pentagonal structure below and fore of the airship. “Where all the beggars go to panhandle. I do hope you plan to do something about them, King Howl. The
Herald
says they’re the main cause of disease.”

“I find that unlikely,” said Caliph.

The woman’s mouth opened in mute shock. “Well! The papers are written by scientists, your majesty. And they’re poor.” She said the word poor like she might have said the word evil.

Vhortghast’s eyes flicked to Caliph, scrutinizing him suddenly for any reaction.

“Actually I believe the papers are written by journalists,” said Caliph.

The spymaster smiled wanly and tossed back his brandy.

“Disease or no,” said Travis Whittle, the burgomaster of Lampfire Hills, “most of our expenditures go to mopping up after them. That’s just the way it is. We have eight thousand city police to pay!”

“And Ghoul Court should pay for seventy-five percent of them,” said Clayton Redfield. He was the burgomaster of Bl
kton.

Everyone laughed except Caliph and Zane Vhortghast.

The unpleasant woman was clearly drunk. “I think we should sell them as slaves to the Pplarians or collect them for the physicians to experiment on, not the police I mean but the poor. If we get some useful medicine out of them, it will be absolutely ticky.”

“Ticky?” whispered Caliph.

Vhortghast smiled. “Means clever or novel. That dress she’s wearing is ticky.”

“I see.”

The
Byun-Ghala
was churning east and Caliph could see the terrifying black splendor of Hullmallow Cathedral erupting from the chimneys of Grue Hill. The enormous structure utterly dwarfed every other building in sight. Like a diffuse nightmare, the ornamented spires and flying buttresses gave the appearance of a grossly fat, daemonic spider with sky bent legs and a horrid horn-encrusted head.

Caliph endured another hour as they sailed over Lampfire Hills, where Travis Whittle pointed out all the peculiar wonders of his domain but snubbed questions about Winter Fen and Daoud’s Bend, the boroughs abutting his south and east borders.

When the zeppelin turned north, Caliph noticed how the pilot avoided the sky above Ghoul Court and churned instead into Maruchine.

Up ahead, rising from what by now had become a monotonous clutter of peaked roofs, six enormous zeppelin towers fumbled like partially exhumed claws toward the stratosphere. An array of other airships could now be seen drifting over Thief Town and Murkbell. They carried huge industrial parts through the dirt-smeared skies.

Malgôr Hangar, however, was a strictly military installation. Built lower to the ground than Hullmallow Cathedral, it was less visible but still ten times the size. It housed most of Isca’s zeppelin fleet at the very heart of the city on the border between Maruchine and Thief Town.

Caliph’s zeppelin ride had come to an end.

The ship slowed and eased toward one of the six towers. They docked with a disconcerting lurch as somewhere far below ropes were quickly tightened.

Enormous gears and pistons like titanic tree trunks adjusted the dock’s elevation, pulling the airship down.

“We’ll be bidding Mrs. Din farewell here,” whispered Zane.

“Is that her name?” remarked Caliph, watching the woman gather her dress as she prepared to disembark.

“Freja Din and Salmalin Mywr aren’t natives,” said Vhortghast lowly, “they have strong ties to Greymoor and the Pandragonian Empire—respectively. Both of them would probably like nothing better than to see Stonehold and especially Isca annexed by a southern power.”

“They’re harmless gadabouts,” muttered Yrisl. “Don’t let him spook you. They spend too much time at the opera to plan a coup.”

Vhortghast curled his lip at the Blue General as though catching wind of something foul.

Caliph’s head hurt from trying to see the entire city from the air. He stepped up to a spyglass and peered through its lens at a distant clock tower. Eight-sixteen. Nearly noon. His stomach grumbled.

“Right this way, your majesty.”

Caliph didn’t even look at who was talking to him. He turned and headed back through the stateroom, stale with the smell of cigar butts, spilled brandy and sweating bodies.

A bridge led to solid ground and a windswept battlement behind which the sky glowered with wisps of dirty rain already falling over Tin Crow and Nevergreen.

Freja Din guided her husband directly toward the shelter of the tower as though frightened by the wind.

“The opera house is just there,” pointed Vhortghast, “across the canal in Murkbell. We’ll meet them again this evening for the premier of
Er Krue Alteirz
. The High Seneschal will be coming.”

“Do we have tickets?”

Vhortghast grinned like a ruined fence.

“The High King donates a sizable sum to the opera. You have the best seats in the house. We don’t need tickets.”

Caliph was beginning to understand that ordinary rules did not apply to him. He could do virtually whatever he wanted and all but the most outlandish would accommodate him without question.

“I’m hungry.”

“You’ll want to save your appetite for this evening,” said Vhortghast.

Caliph scowled visibly. “Actually I’m starving.” The eggs and strudel had been wonderful but hadn’t stuck with him past an hour ago.

Vhortghast shrugged.

“We can eat, but you may lose whatever you put down.”

“Why?”

“We have some business which I’m fairly certain you will find most memorable—more so than our zeppelin ride and more so than
Er Krue Alteirz
, unfortunately because it is somewhat . . . distasteful.”

Caliph’s hunger slacked only slightly at the spymaster’s words.

⁶
W.: “Sena sleeps.”

⁷
D.W.: A hit squad of witches composed of three Ascendant Sisters.

Caliph never saw the zeppelin hangars of Malgôr firsthand—at least not that day. He heard about them instead from Vhortghast on his way down a crepuscular spiral staircase deep inside the northwest zeppelin tower. Humming overhead metholinate lights illuminated patches of rust and slippery stone.

“Watch your step,” warned Vhortghast.

They passed through several well-manned checkpoints before the staircase dumped them into a small dingy tiled foyer with the number six painted in red, barely visible through layers of grime.

They stepped out into a half tube that tunneled north and south. Over one hundred fifty feet wide and seventy-five floor to ceiling, the black-green tunnel burrowed out of sight in both directions, obscured slightly by steam and questionable vapors that drifted aimlessly over the floor. The space was lit by sustained magnesium lights suspended far overhead.

Cones of intense white revealed patches of crud-caked block work, walls befouled in a way that suggested black frosting dripping down the sides of a moldy cake. Echoing reverberations and random mechanical clicking filled the quiet vault with ominous background noise.

Vhortghast pulled a breaker switch. It snapped down with a faint sizzle. From the south, a pinpoint of yellow light flared up in the curtain of blackness and a clattering racket chugged slowly toward them. The yellow light drew closer every moment, seeming to gain momentum until its awkward truth was revealed.

It passed through a harsh white pool thrown across the tracks, taking the shape of a strange mechanized engine with a small front cabin and an enormous swollen canister lying behind it. Like a queen termite it rolled into view. The light on its nose revealed it was number six in some unknown series of stations or contraptions or both. Below its bolted numeral, a heavy framework of ornate wheels, six on each side, connected it to the tunnel’s rails.

Behind the front cabin, which was choked with levers and rods, eight additional wheels supported the long iron canister whose paint bubbled
with corrosion. Small chemiostatic lights glowed limey and pale in the dark.

The vehicle seized suddenly, squeaking on the rails, disturbing the low waft of steam across the floor. A sour smell filled the air.

Vhortghast motioned Caliph in and threw several indistinguishable rods.

The grotesque contraption lurched, plunging forward into the dark.

“We’re under Thief Town now,” mentioned Vhortghast. “Headed toward the docks.”

Caliph had said nothing during their entire time down the staircase. He didn’t know what to say. Finally he tried, “I take it these aren’t the normal subway tunnels?”

Vhortghast’s reaction couldn’t be seen in the dark.

“No. There are the sewers. Then there are the streetcar tunnels. And then there are these. No one knows about these except myself, the dissolved Council, the men who work in them and now you.”

“What about the Blue General?”

“Clueless.”

“Where in Emolus’ name are we going?” The canister-bearing engine was hissing along at a clip faster than a galloping horse. The magnesium lights passed by overhead. Stripes of light and dark flashing. They made Caliph’s head throb.

Soon they passed another alcove with the number five stenciled in red paint.

“Have you ever wondered where a city of two million people gets all its food?” Vhortghast’s question brought an irrational hysteria to Caliph’s mind. “I mean the Duchy of Stonehold isn’t exactly huge yet we’ve got Vale Briar with close to three hundred thousand. Tentinil with another hundred thousand. Miskatoll is what? About four hundred thousand? And then Mort
rm weighs in at sixty-two thousand. In the shadow of Kjnardag that’s a lot of people to feed off a landscape too cold to grow decent crops. And those are just the capital cities. Add the smaller towns and villages from Gadramere to Tairgreen and this is a damned densely populated country with some rocky fields and a deep dark sea that’s been heavily fished for half a thousand years. If we didn’t supplement what our hard-working cotters produce, and what our sleepless fishermen bring in, we’d have hardly enough to feed ourselves—maybe not enough at all—let alone any caviar or isinglass to export.”