The Last Page (57 page)

At the door she stopped and listened.

Silence.

She had just set her muscles in motion, building momentum to dart from the shadow under the window to the shadow of the bedroom, when a tall thin man walked out from the narrow crack of blackness.

Sena pulled up short and diverted her energy into a spin that planted her shoulder soundlessly against the north wall. Still in shadow, she rested at a forty-five degree angle to the man-thing’s flank.

The tall creature stretched its fingers and glanced around as though tasting the air. He looked frustrated. One of his hands dribbled gore and his sleeve flapped heavy and red. He must have been seven feet tall. Bone thin. White saggy flesh hung from his neck and hollow deep-set eyes glittered with pink light.

His clothing was a mess, spattered and crusty with mud and foul-smelling sludge. Partially dried clods of night soil had fractured and fallen away from his pant cuffs, leaving a trail as he walked down the center of the carpeted hall.

Sena saw an opportunity. She could dart out, slip up behind him, plunge her knife into his kidney, pull it out before he fell, draw it deeply across his throat. She had been trained for this. She had practiced the movements like a dancer in the gymnasium at Skellum.

But something sat on her instinct to kill. Intuition perhaps.

She waited.

A second man emerged from the High King’s bedroom. Equally filthy, equally gaunt and horrifying. His eyes were more orange; more amber, like little nuggets of petrified sap. He too was speckled with blood and sewage. A third and fourth man exited the bedroom. They were shorter and carried weapons. They wore gas masks around their necks like bulky chokers.

Sena consoled herself on the fact that she had waited. None of them carried bags or packs. None of them carried anything besides the two with broadswords. They looked ridiculous, like people that had been at work and suddenly gone insane, leaving customers at the counter to embark on some blood-soaked impracticality. They looked thoroughly psychotic. Thoroughly deranged.

None of them carried the
C
srym T
. Nor could they have hidden it, as big as it was, in their vests or suit coats or tucked it discreetly under an arm.

If not the book then what? Why would men like those that attacked them at the opera ransack Caliph’s bedroom within the hour?

Sena drew blood from her palm. She whispered an equation to stanch the wound and used the remaining holojoules to throw a glamour down the hall.

From the far end, a light glimmered. Her own voice laughed lightly. Echoing. Two indistinct figures passed south around the door frame, shimmery and fumbling. Like inebriated lovers stumbling off to fuck.

The pack of four men set off at once, headed for the illusion.

Sena crept around the door and vanished into the bedroom. Despite the jungled darkness, she could tell the entire chamber had been destroyed.

The mattress was ripped open. Feathery guts disemboweled and scattered over the corpses of what she estimated to be half a dozen castle guards. Formerly magnificent wardrobes were virtually torn apart, broken into as though they had been searched for secret parts.

Chairs and trunks were splintered. Slashed cushions exuded cotton like tissue dribbling from open wounds. Even the fireplace grate had been uprooted, cast aside and the ashes excavated carelessly as if by an unruly dog.

Sena turned to the rolltop desk. It had been shattered. Broken ink bottles and papers where distributed without consideration. The drawers were emptied and tossed aside.

The
C
srym T
was gone.

Sena gasped.

She held her stomach. She looked at the exact place she had left it. Defiantly, as though she could bullwhip reality for misbehaving, she pawed through the nearby refuse. From fast-flowing undercurrents of thought, she drew up a bucket full of aching icy acceptance that she would not find it.

As the slow realization began to sink in, anger seemed amphigoric. She couldn’t alter what had happened. But what now? How could she get it back?

Her thoughts leapt to the four men that had left the bedroom just before she came in. She tried to remember clearly. But second-guessing herself was useless. She knew none of them had carried the book.

She couldn’t think. The
C
srym T
’s
absence filled her mind like a yawning chasm. Years of legwork sifting information, clues, rumors and outright prevarications had been wasted. As if she had been sculpting a masterpiece for the past four and a half years and some vandal had come along with a sledge.

Sena couldn’t breathe.

She sank down amid the ruined room, stunned.

I have to leave,
she thought.
I have to follow the men.
Nothing else made sense. There was nothing else to do.

She jumped up and bolted from the room, sprinting down the center of the hall, sticking to the narrow strip of carpet that swallowed up the beating of her feet.

She hadn’t even grabbed a pair of boots. She had no time. The men had already disappeared.

Caliph heard the sound of fighting. It echoed strangely through wood and marble halls, faint shouts that hinted at profound urgency. The clang of ringing steel like a bell. He did not wait for Zane.

He tore off down the hall, sword in hand, looking for a place to stick his boiling rage.

As he ran, the sound grew louder. He could hear yelps and cries and strange inhuman grunts. After turning several corners left and right he barreled directly into the fray.

He had come up behind the enemy. A group of guards to the west held their ground against a trio of tall thin men nearly identical to those Caliph had seen at the opera. The guards were cut off. They faced the man-things head-on, sword to hand. They saw Caliph appear on the far side but they couldn’t reach him.

Caliph sailed into battle. He had arrived with such velocity that his presence went unnoticed until he had already run one through. The broadsword Zane had handed him slotted neatly into the center of the creature’s back, made its legs to go pliant.

Caliph drove the sword out through the belly and wrenched it back, pulling it from the terrible wound before the creature fell sprawling to the floor, its spinal cord severed.

Caliph turned and set upon another savagely. His sword struck the rib cage but seemed to glance as if from glassy steel, turning the sword in his
hand and nearly forcing it from his grasp. His recovery was awkward and slow.

The men, cowering and nearly beaten, rallied. They rushed forward, taking advantage of the hole Caliph had created in the enemy line. For a moment, the man-things thrashed and floundered as the soldiers surrounded them.

But the thing on the floor was still crawling, pulling its useless legs behind. It reached out huge hands and pulled one guard’s feet out from under him.

The ghastly mouth opened to reveal a picket fence of yellow teeth. It bit ruthlessly through the guardsman’s leather, eliciting a scream.

Caliph lost his footing as the half-paralyzed creature lurched around the floor. He reeled backward, crashing into the west wall and heading for the carpet.

Blades were glittering with their own vibrations as they struck and glanced off the strangely deflective hides. The creatures’ clothing had been hacked away. Ragged and snarling they endured a hail of blows.

The guards hewed with all their fury but only one stroke in three drew blood.

Caliph looked up to see one guard’s sword turn aside so abruptly that it struck another guard and cut him deeply on the upswing. It chopped through his pectoral muscle, up into his armpit, deep enough to sever the subclavian. The man screamed as a fountain of red burst from his arm, an unstoppable rhythmic torrent.