The Last Page (93 page)

So this is what it’s like,
she thinks.
This is what it means to be Sslîa . . .

Sena orders a servant to buy two crows in Octul Box and bring them to the high tower garret. It is time she did something. Stonehold is the only place she has to lay her head and she knows acutely, since rifling Lewis’ brain, that Caliph is not winning.

The black wisp of soot that haunts her, tells her what to do. But first, like all good holomorphs, she decides . . . she insists on running a proof.

Sena locks the door. The servant has come and gone. A large cage hanging from the rafters contains a pair of rooks. They blink angrily and grouse for space. They will save her badly bruised eyes; she has left the shylock in her room.

As she moves, the birds’ agitation increases. A sporadic drizzle of sable feathers touches the floor. She does not attempt to soothe them.

She stands before a blackboard and makes the calculations, scribbling out the numbers she will translate into words. As the chalk moves she begins to whisper, the sky outside begins to turn. Her eyes notice it as if from miles away, vast gouts of chocolate stratosphere and sapphirine vapor rotating like toilet water centered on Isca’s tallest spire.

She sees the streets, the pavement nymphs and worm gang members and gadabouts from Winter Fen to Ironside who stop to marvel at the snail shell of cloud. But when little fingers of lightning begin to play the city’s cables like discordant strings, when the lines that carry short supplies of power begin to lap the wind and a fine gray sleet begins to fall, she sees the rubbernecking end. People run for cover.

Sena opens the
C
srym T
.
Her vocal cords are incapable of pronouncing any of the Inti’Drou glyphs. She must dilute them, take parts of them and transpose them with the Unknown Tongue. Something she can use. Even so, its primacy is extant.

She speaks a word and both rooks die in an explosion that splashes
the floor. Her tongue moves, knocking out words made of numbers made of blood. They are brighter and darker than the Unknown Tongue. They are smoother. They are pure. She cannot reduce them further any more than she can use a stick to draw a sunset in the dirt.

Her incantation pours several different algorithms into one; then puts her argument in place.

It is a proof so she follows all the rules, doesn’t cut corners, makes everything painfully clear.

The test she has chosen is the equivalent of tipping a dart with an unknown chemical and hurling it at a creature in a cage. After it is done, she will wait and watch, morbidly, because she doesn’t know exactly what the
C
srym T
’s concoction will do.

Her conscience troubles her minutely in a purely scientific way. She has to know. So she aims her missile at a seemingly overeager volunteer, a target she has been saving all her venom up for years.

Sena speaks and her lips launch the invisible and ancient bolt, hurling it beyond the Greencap Mountains, across the Valley of Eloth, into the Country of Mir
yhr. Her aim is perfectly precise, pointed at a parody of family that has so often made her choke. With long-anticipated retribution, with angst grown bitter as a root, she spits her dart at Megan.

Alani knew everything.

He knew how carefully Caliph had planned this war. He knew how the bodies from Ghoul Court had been dressed in zeppelin uniforms and laid at the site of the
Orison
’s crash. He knew how the timing had been so critical, perfectly synchronized with the departure of Bjor
n Amphungtal’s airship from Isca. King Lewis could be arrested and imprisoned but Mr. Amphungtal was a diplomat: far beyond the reach of Stonehold’s criminal system. He was untouchable.

Alani imagined Amphungtal’s smile as he bid Caliph good-bye the evening before his flight left. How he must have relished the fact that the blueprints had been recovered, that Caliph Howl was doomed and that he, Bjor
n Amphungtal, was escaping via airship just before calamity struck! But such was not the case.

In clear dawn, Mr. Amphungt
l’s zeppelin was brought down under a hail of gunfire. Its gasbags were rent. Its luxurious cabin was riddled with holes. It crashed near Clefthollow in broad daylight to the amazed eyes of townsfolk and soldiers stationed below. There were no survivors.

The news rocked the Duchy and spread south: that a Pandragonian ambassador had been fired on, murdered as the papers said, killed ruthlessly
and illegally by a Stonehavian airship. But the airship that killed Mr. Amphungtal was not part of the High King’s fleet. It was a sky shark flying the colors of Saergaeth Brindlestr
m.

Alani smiled.

Caliph had made it impossible for Pandragor to publicly support Saergaeth in Stonehold’s civil war. He could do nothing about the munitions and supplies that the Pandragonians had already delivered, but there would be no southern zeppelins in Saergaeth’s fleet. The war was back to being fair. As fair as it would ever be.

Alani and his men had landed behind enemy lines after shooting down the southern ship and moved swiftly to the next stage of Caliph’s multiphase plan.