The Last Page (81 page)

When the troops opened it, their astonishment distilled from silence. Drooling icy vapor trickled from its frosty mouth across the tilted floor.

Inside was surreal bounty.

On great hooks, fifty enormous bulbs of unidentifiable meat depended, each several times the size of an entire cow.

A soldier stepped forward and stabbed at one with his sword but the frozen carcass was like granite. His powerful thrust wasn’t even enough to set the obscene hunk of flesh swinging.

There didn’t seem to be many bones. It was all meat. Enough meat, in fact, to feed a huge amount of men. Besides the protein there were bags of flour and canned goods. Pearlums and beans and salted corn.

Lastly, in a vault, were the glass tubes flanged in bolted metal, glowing peculiar hues of purple, electric-pink and blue and other colors impossible to name. They shimmered in the vault like baroque jewels.

One of the sky sharks was signaled down. It dropped tethers and an army of men strained to secure it along the river’s edge.

It took four hours to load all the new cargo into the belly of a ship no longer designed to ferry supplies.

The sky shark had been outfitted like the rest of Saergaeth’s fleet with turrets and ballistae and racks of aerosol bombs.

In order to fit the huge tank of meat, they had to shuttle some of the zeppelin’s munitions into the already cramped war engines chugging nearby.

The two-hundred glowing canisters were left strapped in their vault. The entire closet-sized room was then winched on a crane that extended off one of the engine’s scorpion-like tails and hoisted into the zeppelin’s hold.

Finally, just as night was falling, the sky shark revved its engines and headed into the deadened sky.

When Caliph got the news, he left Isca in the
Byun-Ghala
, escorted by several zeppelins that emerged like underwater creatures from the steel corrals of Malgôr Hangar. Dark spiny puffers floating out of candent holes, they pummeled the other side of day with their engines, left bands of soot and crossed the enormous double wall of the Hold, motoring into jellied air above the High King’s Moor.

Thick amoeboid clouds clotted the night. The glitter of crofts and villages flecked an indistinct and inky landscape several thousand feet below.

Though they were stocked with epicurean delights, Caliph left the warmth of his staterooms for the chilly observation deck.

He smelled fresh vapors shredding against the propellers. Cold spongy space smacked the deck beneath the airship’s turgid skin.

He had so much to think about that, for a little while, his course into darkness felt almost like escape. He soaked in the clammy wind.

With this small fleet, he had come to personally oversee the transfer of several unexpected prisoners of war. Taken in a recent skirmish west of Clefthollow and held in tiny cells, they had been confined for nearly a day aboard the same spy dirigible that had sent Caliph word of the
Orison
’s crash.

Thirty miles outside of Isca the rendezvous was about to happen in the dark, like insects coupling on the fly.

Caliph heard the engines shift; strange, auxiliary sounds reverberating through the zeppelin.

He braced himself against the rail as green lights skeletonized the dart-like shadow of some frail craft that had risen through the gloom and materialized above the deck. Like photophores on a deep-sea fish, the luminaries glistered and burned through the ether.

The spy dirigible’s slender frame slid knife-like into a mooring socket on the
Precursor
, one of the
Byun-Ghala
’s more heavily armed escorts.

Caliph had insisted on being present. After all, he knew one of the prisoners.

He smiled without mirth or patience.

Just about everyone in Stonehold it seemed had become a traitor.

Alani was blind.

Occasionally he squirmed in the tight darkness. His cramped, slippery prison had no door. His body ached.

Despite such constraints and a pair of stiff, ponderous gloves, he manipulated a slender humming device.

He twisted violently but it was no use.

He could taste his own breath against invisible glass, less than an inch ahead of his face. Like a fetus clutching its placenta he curled over a bulky bag that pressed his gut.

Swallowing fear he tried again but the slick, coriaceous walls held him fast.

He bowed his back and heaved left, thrusting with his legs. The pressure on his shoulder caused the socket buried beneath his deltoid to dislocate with a sick, internal pop.

He wrangled like something broken in the dark and managed to adjust, gain adequate leverage and proceed.

The object in his hand scraped against the wall. It still hummed and now shed a subtle light, stirring faint maroon patterns in the glass across his face.

Powered by a holomorphic tube, the instrument’s calescent edge shivered with a sonic whine. It bit the wall like a scalpel working in hard rubber.

Alani clenched his teeth against the pain and pushed with his legs, trying to stretch the compartment. Nothing moved.

The instrument grew hot even through his insulated gloves.

He had to get out. He could feel the plangent reverb of the airship’s engines slowing down.

He carved furiously at the wall.

A slit began to open in the thick hard blackness. He pushed with all his might. The wall began to give.

With three additional minutes of surgery and two more ferocious attempts, it finally broke. The crack stretched then tore along a fibrous grain, ripping apart like wood.

Alani fell out onto a hard metal floor covered with lumpy, bloody frost.

Above him hung a ruptured, hollow bulb of meat.

His metal helmet was caked with crimson ice. Rubber hoses trailed back into the carcass like umbilici. They breached the meat’s upper girth where pipe had once taken the place of a trachea, poking through just below the hook where hidden stitches sealed the point of Alani’s nightmarish insertion.

Chemiostatic coils warmed air in the helmet’s breathing apparatus.

His thick white suit was smeared and filthy. Braided wires webbed the chest, legs, feet and hands, coursing with inward warmth. Although very little heat escaped, the cavity inside the meat had indeed begun to thaw.

Alani discarded the gloves and peeled off the heavy jacket that buttoned up his side. The bag he had been clutching unrolled across the floor, revealing an assortment of tools in sparkling green beneath the beam of a fresh chemiostatic torch.

Sena hits early snow in the mountains. She isn’t ready for the cold. It takes her breath, forces her into a substandard inn at Mossloch. In the morning, she watches helplessly as the sizable flakes come down.

What am I going to do?

She is almost out of money. The pass is choked with snow. She wipes tears with the black ruffle of her sleeve, leaves the inn, trudges north. She feels worse than miserable. She feels contemptible, despicable and vile.

It has been a long time since she cried. Normally she would try to stifle it, hold it in her throat like bile but today she does not care. She walks down the mountain, beaten and blubbering.

Bilious, dissimilar voices whisper in her head. Her vision blurs. The heavy book in her pack feels like solid stone.

For several hours she doesn’t have a plan.

She walks to Isca.

From West Gate, she follows Kink Street out of Gunnymead Square. The cotters have begun dragging in the grain tax and corpulent scurrying things shit and crawl and fuck contentedly between unattended sacks of barley and rye. A carriage driver takes pity on her and offers her a ride. He doesn’t recognize her. He is headed home, he says, and will drop her off along the way. She accepts though she doesn’t have a clue where she is going.

The driver leaves Three Cats on Sedge Way, turning north at Cripple Gate onto Isca Road. They trundle over streetcar rails into South Fell, rolling through the shadows of the Bînd
sh Ruins which have long been gated up but still offer weekend tours.

In Thief Town, sea-weathered towers thrust gray stoic forms above narrow ticking streets. Sena gets out and wanders aimlessly through the tepid late-afternoon air. From the mountain pass to the valley floor, she thinks the temperature difference must be at least fifty degrees.

She heads west, muddles back into South Fell where six stories of barred windows cast block-long shadows off the edifice of Teapetal Wax.
She wears her hood up for disguise, but in the ebbing light her identity is already totally diffused.

Vague human shadows inside lamp-lit shops haggle over the last transactions of the day. Clustered vertical meadows of leaded glass ripple with autumn-colored light.

Reluctant but resolved, she hurries out of South Fell into Bl
kton, up through fading blossomed lanes.

The smoky light of the markets dissipates before her eyes as she travels quickly through the sparsely peopled blocks near Gilnaroth and into the Hold.

The castle gates will close at dusk. A sign of urgency: above the darkened rooftops the ancient mill has locked its sails for the day.

Although factories in Bilgeburg produce great dusty piles of flour and cereal, people who imagine themselves coinsurers spend stacks of extra money in the castle mill on flavored germades, coffee beans and jam.

Sena darts through the cobbled twilight, under chimney pots spewing madder-tinted air; their pleasant-smelling smut mixes with the warm fermenting odors of dwindling summer. Autumn smells are taking over: leather and shoe polish and chemical laundries that froth through vented pipes into the cold.

Just before the sun vanishes, she arrives.

Somehow it has snuck up on her and, for a moment, her determination falters.

In the last rays, the castle stones are orange. Long blue shadows, like banners, fall between the gates. Across the drawbridge, sparkling suits of armor shuffle in the gloom.

She bites her lip, clenches her nails into her palms and takes a final breath.

She storms the gate.

At first, the soldiers do not see her coming. They are mumbling over the smell of the moat, restless with the season. They scrape around their posts.