The Last Page (63 page)

“Out where?” Cameron looks around. There are no houses, roads or signs of habitation. Just forest and fallen leaves.

“I don’t know.” Caliph bounces along, stopping to overturn rocks and tug at leaves. “He shows up when I want to play.”

The dappled sway of woodland shadows grows faintly chill. The darkness pulls more closely beneath venerable elms. Caliph can tell that Cameron feels unsettled.

Ahead, gleams of white polished stone lean this way and that, moved by shifts in the ground.

The area is not very large. Only a score of markers jut from uneven soil.

“You come here to play? Do you know what this place is?”

Caliph smiles and regards Cameron with obvious amusement. “Are you scared?”

Cameron clamps his hands together.

“It’s just not the normal place to play. That’s all.”

Caliph climbs a hillock and surveys the sleeping kingdom with sly reverence.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Oh, nothing. So this Marco, he comes to play with you here?”

“Sometimes.”

Caliph leaps from the hillock and runs briefly toward a pair of doors set into a nearby hillside.

“Wait! Don’t!”

But Caliph doesn’t listen. He climbs the vines over the façade, smiles and looks back out of the corner of his eye, expecting Cameron to give chase.

Instead, Cameron shrugs and begins to walk between the stones. It looks like he is reading.

Suddenly Cameron falls to his knees. He seems frightened. He begins to scream. “Where is a spade?” He is shrieking, whirling. “Get me a spade!” He begins tearing at the clay.

“I remember.” Caliph nodded. “I remember you started digging with your hands. I think I ran away.”

Cameron didn’t smile. “Think I’m crazy yet?”

“No. I want to hear. I want to remember.”

Cameron eased back into the cushions. The shadows seemed to take him in and make it easier for him to talk.

“I studied your uncle. Even after he died. His name pops up a lot in places you might and might not expect. I had to . . . study him. Sort out what happened in that house.”

“I have dreams of that house.”

Cameron nodded. “So do I.”

Suddenly Caliph wasn’t alone in the house on Isca Hill. Someone else had been there, with him, seen things, dreamt terrifying dreams. “Tell me what you dreamt.”

Cameron didn’t answer right away and when he did, he took the long way. The slow way. The same way he must have come to Stonehold, with every word prepared.

“I’ll get to that. First let me tell you about your uncle.”

“Filling in holes—”

Cameron nodded. “Nathaniel planned his ascension to the High King’s throne for a reason I still don’t fully understand. Something more than simple ego . . . more than power. He was almost successful at doing something I think might have sealed the Duchy’s fate.

“At seventy-three years, most of his life had been spent in preparation.

“He was born in Stonehold. Left his family in the Duchy and traveled to Greymoor to study. After his graduation, he made a solitary trip to Twyrloch and when he came back—alone and nearly dead—he was carrying a book.

“Apparently its latch required a loathsome bargain to unlock. He had just accepted a position as professor at the High College when he took a sudden leave of absence.

“He traveled back to Stonehold. Lived in the house on Isca Hill while his sister’s family went away on holiday to the south.

“While they were gone he charmed a girl. Told her the house was his.

“He used her blood to open a holomorphic lock on the tome.”

Caliph blanched. “How do you know this? It doesn’t sound like something you read in a book.”

“Because he told me. He bragged about it. The old man was a letch. Anyway, after that, he said he went back to the High College and contented himself to study—for a time.

“Seems the older he grew, the more frenetic he became. Sensed his time was running out. He took sabbatical in the west-most hills of Stonehold, following a wisp of legend.

“He found something in the hills. In the mountains around the Lost Dale. Something he jotted in his notes. Notes I saw while I lived at the house.

“Something about the Navels of the World.

“It was a place he could go. A place that would let him live until Yacob’s Roll ran out. But it was also hidden. Cut off. Nathaniel could never hope to access it. It was a place he would have to commit murder to enter. Someplace close at hand.”

Caliph looked around. “You mean here? In the castle?”

“I think so. I believe that’s why he needed to be king. And so his real plot began. Over the course of two decades, through poison and holomorphy, he eliminated his own kin to the point that he alone stood in line for the High King’s throne.

“But too much coincidence would damn him from the crown. So Nathaniel devised another way. A special way to kill the king.”

Caliph hadn’t touched his wine. He leaned forward, eager to hear more.

Instead, Cameron handed Caliph a piece of paper.

Caliph took it and unfolded it, not understanding what it could be. On the page was Jacob’s handwriting. He read it quickly, twice. One section jumped out of the page.

No one will remember. No one will recognize you after so many years. The boy loves you. He has always loved you more than me. You can give him perspective. Explain the footsteps he’s following. I wouldn’t ever ask if he hadn’t requested it himself. Please . . .

“ ‘No one will recognize you’?” asked Caliph. A picture was beginning to form.

“I was tricked in the snow. A bad storm. The High King was on maneuvers in the Fort Line. Nathaniel must have had it planned.” Cameron’s eyes were haunted. “The royal guards weren’t in uniform. Bundled up against the snow. I thought they were bandits.”

“But how?”

“I don’t know. Mathematics. Twisted possibilities and time. Your uncle was an exceptional holomorph. Which brings me to the final truth. The reason you’ll think I’m crazy.”

Caliph waited patiently for the secret to be revealed.

“You remember Marco?”

Caliph’s throat tightened on the name. All he could do was nod.

Cameron’s broad shoulders quivered slightly as he spoke. The muscles in his face strained to control an involuntary spasm in his jaw. “I do too. One night.” He shook his head. “The sooty darkness covering the floor. I listened like a child for whatever woke me.

“Everything was silent. Everything was still and cold. I remember I looked out into the hall first. Through my bedroom door there was a lone candle. Deformed and melting.

“I listened to the absence of noise. Turned my head slowly, sensing something there. Watching me. Something soundless. Without the noise of breathing.

“That’s when I saw it. In the smudgy purple of my own room, the thing in the darkness.”

Cameron paused, apparently horrified at his own words. Eventually he forged on.

“His face was white, like wax—hanging eight feet off the floor. A black brimmed hat hid his eyes. But it was the grin I remember most! Fierce. Predatory. Laying bare a set of teeth. Interlocking canines that seemed to laugh without noise.

“Then it fell backward, the whole phantom, like an anchor, vanishing into the shadows at the corner of the room. It made the drapery ebb like ink.

“I’ve cried for you, Caliph, when I’ve thought about you, rocked in your cradle by that man. Sung holomorphic lullabies by the necromancer
on Isca Hill. His rhymes struggled from your nursery on their own, made nightmares lurch around the yard.

“You asked me which High King I served. I served King Raymond VII.”

Caliph sank deeper into a numbing chill. “But. That. Was . . . 1397.”

“The highest form of holomorphy charged the house on Isca Hill. So high that no one, not even the Shr
dnae Sisterhood, dared to move against him. I am a product of Nathaniel’s art.”

Caliph shook his head.

“I’m the figure box in math books that can be drawn but not built. Nathaniel built me. The capstone of his achievement. The success story that followed his failure with Marco Howl’s ancient, mutant corpse. He needed someone good with a blade. Someone who could cut through a group of the king’s high guard. He found me in the pages of his own genealogy, brought me back to become a nameless, faceless assassin.

“And you are something like my great, great, great, great grandnephew: Caliph Howl.”

Caliph sat in a stupor. The winter morning they had left for Greymoor snapped back to him with clarity now.

Caliph is playing in the yard when Cameron and Nathaniel exit the house. They look cross with each other. Caliph comes running up to them with a small shout and jumps to the top step.

“Caliph, settle down,” Nathaniel chides.

The three of them pause on the front steps while Nathaniel fiddles with something under his cloak.

Caliph traces his fingers over the massive oak portals with iron animals that stare straight back when Nathaniel turns his key inside the lock. Snow lands on their iron snouts and dusts the steps.

Nathaniel produces an earthen bowl of some steaming liquid he has sheltered beneath his cloak. He holds it by the lip with two fingers and swirls it gently as though it is a wand.

A smooth sheet of fluid breaks over the lip and falls, splattering deep crimson across the stone. It melts the feathery flakes at once, drinking them into itself.

Nathaniel traces a three-stroke design in it with the toe of his boot and says something in the Unknown Tongue. What is left of the clotting fluid in the bowl, he places in front of the doors and with a deathly thin smile walks out into the falling snow.

“When will we come back?” asks Caliph. His voice sounds oddly muffled
under the swirling flakes. He stands on the steps looking down at the warm fluid with casual interest.

“I told you not to think about that,” Nathaniel snaps.

Caliph crouches down and touches the puddle lightly with one thumb. He holds it up for Cameron to see, a dark red oval on his young skin.

“You shouldn’t touch it,” Cameron says softly.

Caliph shrugs and jumps down the steps with one heroic leap.

“Why? It’s just blood. We’re all going to die. It’s unavoidable.”

Nathaniel’s laugh echoes through the snowy forest near the yard. “Speak for yourself, boy.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” Caliph said slowly. “I wanted to see you—” He forced himself to spit it out. “My reasons have changed for needing to see you. I guess . . . I suppose . . . I needed to remember. Everything is wrong. My uncle, my history, this war . . . I don’t like being king. I’m not even sure I like who I am.”

Cameron sipped his cup and winced. The milk was still hot. “There, you see? The Blue General can be wounded by hot milk.”

Caliph was glad to chuckle, anything to break the awful oppressiveness of their previous topic. “There’s a lesson there, I suppose.”

“Mmm.” Cameron nodded and swallowed. “The lesson is . . .” He held his cup aloft. “That the world is made up of very small things. This conversation for instance.”

He took a somewhat more cautious sip. “If you don’t like being king, run away.”

“What?”

Cameron nodded. “I’m serious, run away—you’re king, what are they going to do to you? It’s a small thing. A little choice you wake up in the morning and make. Pack a sandwich, walk out the gates and head in any direction you want. I did it once.”

“I can’t believe this is the advice you’re giving me.”

“It’s not advice,” Cameron corrected, setting his cup down with a clink. “It’s the way it is. You can just as easily stay. Every day you have the same choice, leave or stay. Either way, do what you have to. Don’t run this kingdom because you feel the weight of a million sheep farmers on your back. They will survive with or without you.”